New year’s resolution
Post more often.
Happy 2012!
EOS workshop summary
The First International Workshop on Entity-Oriented Search (EOS) was held on July 28, 2011 in Beijing, China, in conjunction with SIGIR 2011. The objective for the workshop was to bring together academic researchers and industry practitioners working on entity-oriented search to discuss tasks and challenges, and to uncover the next frontiers for academic research on the topic. The workshop program accommodated two invited talks, eleven refereed papers divided into three technical paper sessions, and a group discussion.
You can find the workshop proceedings here. A summary report, to appear in the December issue of SIGIR Forum, is already available online.
A Living Lab for Product Search
Earlier today I presented the work by Leif Azzopardi and myself at the CLEF 2011 conference, entitled Towards a Living Lab for Information Retrieval Research and Development. A proposal for a living lab for product search tasks. The abstract follows:
The notion of having a “living lab” to undertaken evaluations has been proposed by a number of proponents within the field of Information Retrieval (IR). However, what such a living lab might look like and how it might be setup has not been discussed in detail. Living labs have a number of appealing points such as realistic evaluation contexts where tasks are directly linked to user experience and the closer integration of research/academia and development/industry facilitating more efficient knowledge transfer. However, operationalizing a living lab opens up a number of concerns regarding security, privacy, etc. as well as challenges regarding the design, development and maintenance of the infrastructure required to support such evaluations. Here, we aim to further the discussion on living labs for IR evaluation and propose one possible architecture to create such an evaluation environment. To focus discussion, we put forward a proposal for a living lab on product search tasks within the context of an online shop.
Full paper | Presentation slides
We are keen to get feedback from the community to see if we should continue to develop this initiative further. If you’re at CLEF this week, come talk to me.
TREC Entity 2011 timeline & guidelines
The timeline for the 2011 edition of the track has been set.
The guidelines are available at this address: http://bit.ly/entity2011-guidelines.
Please follow the track’s mailing list for the related discussion.
Note that it’s still time to sign up for TREC if you haven’t done so already.
Registration will close on May 27.