This issue we include another Call for Reviews in which we seek reviewers for a number of recently published books that may be of interest to the IR community. Books will be allocated for review on a first-come-first-served basis and you would have about one month to carry out the review. If you are interested… Continue reading Call for Book Reviews (Spring 2017)
Book review: Deep Text by Tom Reamy
When I started the London Text Analytics meetup group some seven years ago, ‘text analytics’ was a term used by few, and understood by even fewer. Apart from a handful of enthusiasts and academics (who preferred the label of “natural language processing” anyway), the field was either overlooked or ignored by most people. Even the… Continue reading Book review: Deep Text by Tom Reamy
ECIR 2017 Industry Day Review
The tradition of closing out ECIR with industry day continued for its 11th year in Aberdeen, Scotland. This year’s event was co-organized and moderated by Udo Kruschwitz and Tony Russell-Rose. For those who made the trip up north, a potpourri of exciting applications of academic research in IR and NLP was presented, including event detection… Continue reading ECIR 2017 Industry Day Review
Events Spring 2017
One Day Events Search Solutions 2017. The annual practioner focused event for the IRSG held at the BCS offices in Covent Garden, together with a tutorial day on 28 November 2017, with the main event on 29th November 2017. Conferences/Workshops Healthcare’17: 2017 International Conference on Healthcare Science and Engineering. Of interest to members working in… Continue reading Events Spring 2017
Editorial
Welcome and Happy New Year! “We had a great 2016. 2017 will prove to be even better” as an anonymous letter writer assures me … although he/she/it also assures me that the European Union is doomed and that I should respect the democratic will of the British people. What better way to start the year… Continue reading Editorial
A Case for Satellite Events in Evaluation Campaigns
Local conferences, such as TREC in North America, CLEF in Europe, and NTCIR in Asia, play a leading role in promoting information retrieval research by supporting novel campaigns and releasing datasets to share the latest research challenges. To gain access to these datasets, participants are requested to communicate their work in the form of working… Continue reading A Case for Satellite Events in Evaluation Campaigns
A framework for chatbot evaluation
Unless you’ve been on another planet for the last year or so, you‘ll almost certainly have noticed that chatbots (and conversational agents in general) became quite popular during the course of 2016. It seems that every day a new start up or bot framework was launched, no doubt fuelled at least in part by a… Continue reading A framework for chatbot evaluation
Search Solutions 2016 – Matching the IR talent supply and demand in the industry
This past November 30th 2016, the British Computer Society hosted the Search Solutions forum at its London Offices. It was divided into 5 sessions with the following themes: 1. Understanding users and context, 2. Moving towards question-answering, 3. Beyond web search, 4. New modes of search, and 5. Panel session. Particularly interesting, was the panel… Continue reading Search Solutions 2016 – Matching the IR talent supply and demand in the industry
Call for Industry Day Proposals at ECIR 2017
This year’s ECIR conference will include an Industry Day, following very successful events at ECIR in recent years. The Industry Day will be held on Thursday 13th April 2017, immediately after the regular conference program. The Industry Day’s objectives are three-fold. The first objective is to present the state of the art in search and… Continue reading Call for Industry Day Proposals at ECIR 2017
Information retrieval, information literacy: a common cause?
What do information retrieval (IR) and information literacy (IL) have in common? At a fundamental level, they are both concerned with enabling users to locate and retrieve information, and thereby to meet their information needs; and the deployment of IL is partly dependent on IR systems. To a large extent, there is therefore a common… Continue reading Information retrieval, information literacy: a common cause?