As the recipient of the 2018 Karen Spärck Jones Award, I was invited to give a keynote at the 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR’19). Below are the slides of my presentation.
Highlights from 2018
This was another year when I was just too busy to blog. But, here are a few things from 2018 to be proud of (in no particular order).
- PhD students: Faegheh Hasibi defended her PhD thesis and Trond Linjordet joined my group.
- Our SIGIR’06 paper with Leif Azzopardi and Maarten de Rijke received a Test of Time Honorable Mention Award at SIGIR’18.
- I joined Google for my sabbatical to work on explainable AI in the context of conversational recommender systems.
- I am general co-chair for ICTIR 2020, which will be held in Stavanger, Norway.
- My book on Entity-Oriented Search got published by Springer and is available open access.
- I was recipient of the Karen Spärck Jones Award 2018 for my contributions to the area of semantic search and for my work on evaluation methodology.
Two journal papers on online evaluation
I am a co-author of two journal papers that appeared in the special issues of the Journal of Data and Information Quality on Reproducibility in IR.
The article entitled “OpenSearch: Lessons Learned from an Online Evaluation Campaign” by Jagerman et al. reports on our experience with TREC OpenSearch, an online evaluation campaign that enabled researchers to evaluate their experimental retrieval methods using real users of a live website. TREC OpenSearch focused on the task of ad hoc document retrieval within the academic search domain. We describe our experimental platform, which is based on the living labs methodology, and report on the experimental results obtained. We also share our experiences, challenges, and the lessons learned from running this track in 2016 and 2017.
The article entitled “Evaluation-as-a-Service for the Computational Sciences: Overview and Outlook” by Hopfgartner et al. discusses the Evaluation-as-a-Service paradigm, where data sets are not provided for download, but can be accessed via application programming interfaces (APIs), virtual machines (VMs), or other possibilities to ship executables. We summarize and compare current approaches, consolidate the experiences of these approaches, and outline next steps toward sustainable research infrastructures.
Entity-Oriented Search book
I am pleased to announce that my Entity-Oriented Search book is now available online.
This open access book covers all facets of entity-oriented search—where “search” can be interpreted in the broadest sense of information access—from a unified point of view, and provides a coherent and comprehensive overview of the state of the art. It represents the first synthesis of research in this broad and rapidly developing area. Selected topics are discussed in-depth, the goal being to establish fundamental techniques and methods as a basis for future research and development. Additional topics are treated at a survey level only, containing numerous pointers to the relevant literature. A roadmap for future research, based on open issues and challenges identified along the way, rounds out the book.