Together with ChengXiang Zhai, we will be giving our user simulation tutorial at AAAI’24 and WWW’24, customized to the respective audiences. The AAAI’24 edition adopts a broader perspective of user simulation for evaluating an interactive AI system and focuses more on simulation algorithms and techniques that are well connected with various sub-fields of AI, such as machine learning and agent-based systems. In contrast, the WWW’24 edition emphasizes more on applications of user simulation for evaluating Web information access systems, including click modeling and the application of simulation techniques in e-commerce.
Conferences
Event reports
The June 2022 issue of SIGIR Forum reports on two events that I co-organized:
- The Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG) workshop at the AKBC’21 conference [PDF]
- The 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR’22) that was held in Stavanger, Norway in a hybrid format [PDF]
TREC 2010 summary
The 19th Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) took place at the “usual” time and place: Gaithersburg, MD, in the second half of November. Seven tracks ran in 2010: Blog, Chemical IR, Entity, Legal, Relevance Feedback, Session, and Web.
The Entity track was very popular both in terms of the number of participants and the number of posters presented. The proposed approaches displayed a great degree of diversity and made the presentations very interesting. I don’t want to repeat myself, so I refer to the posts on the Entity website for the conference summary and plans for 2011.
As to TREC 2011, the Chemical IR, Entity, Session, Legal, and Web tracks will continue. The Blog track will migrate to a new Microblog track and will investigate social search, especially search over Twitter data. Two more new tracks will be added: Crowdsourcing (as a means of evaluation) and Medical records (content-based access to the free text fields of medical records, e.g., find patients with disease X treated with Y). Finally, CMU is planning another Web crawl, successor to ClueWeb09; one idea is to have a smaller set of pages, but crawled regularly over a period of time.
CLEF 2010 Keynote 2
The second CLEF 2010 keynote, entitled Retrieval Evaluation in Practice, was given by Ricardo Baeza-Yates. As yesterday, here are my raw notes from the lecture.
CLEF 2010 Keynote 1
I am at the CLEF conference this week. Here are my raw, unedited notes from the first keynote, IR Between Science and Engineering, and the Role of Experimentation, by Norbert Fuhr.