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The ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval has been experiencing significant growth over the past few years. In 2023, SIGIR received a total of 822 full paper submissions and 1,787 papers/proposals. This has brought several challenges to the conference program organization. This article reports some of the main aspects of the work conducted by the program committee (PC) co-chairs for SIGIR 2023, and discusses emergent issues of the review process and program design. We expect that this document serve as a reference for future PC co-chars and as a starting point for further discussions towards improving the review process and overall conference experience. Date: 23--27 July 2023. Website: https://sigir.org/sigir2023/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024) was held in Glasgow, Scotland, during 24th-28th March 2024. The conference brought together over four hundred researchers from the UK, Europe and abroad. ECIR 2024 was a fully in-person conference with a total of 417 attendees, the largest number of in-person attendees of any ECIR. The conference received over 700 submissions, not including submissions to the workshops (280 Full Paper and 184 Short paper submissions). ECIR 2024 introduced a number of novelties, including a new Findings track, an IR4Good track, a new innovation called the "Collab-athon" to foster collaborations within the community, and the Keith van Rijsbergen Award to recognise researchers who have made significant contributions in using theory to advance the field of information retrieval. This report details the conference programme and events. Date: 24--28 March 2024. Website: https://www.ecir2024.org. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023), held in Dublin, Ireland, during April 2--6, 2023. The conference was the largest ECIR ever, and brought together hundreds of researchers from Europe and abroad. For those who like numbers: First, we received 489 submissions in total (including 228 full and 153 short papers) excluding further workshop submissions. Second, the technical program committee consisted of 624 reviewers in total (including 27 chairs, 124 SPC, 473 reviewers) with many serving on multiple tracks. Third, the proceedings necessitated a third volume, and contains a total of 175 papers in 2,151 pages. The rest of this report details the conference program and events. Date: 2--6 April 2023. Website: https://ecir2023.org/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the substitution of paper diaries by electronic diaries, used by the employees. Papermills are gigantic and complex machines, incorporating state-of-the-art technology. As part of a larger project a papermill in Finland was used to provide support for factory floor workers in process industries. Paper diaries were substituted with electronic diaries on one production line employing 35 workers. Entries constitute dialogues within and between work shifts, and partially with other organizational levels. The e-diary design was a cooperative effort between workers in an oil refinery a superintendent and foreman from the papermill, and the research group. It was piloted in the oil refinery, and a refined prototype was used in the papermill. All 35 production line staff workers received about four hours training on the diary including its underlying Microsoft Windows and Lotus Notes applications. E-diary entries are a text version of talking-out-loud-with extended spatial and temporal scope. INSET: An Example of Extended Dialogue Reject Carrier Problems in.....

The 9th ACM SIGIR / The 13th International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2023) held in Taiwan co-located with SIGIR 2023. This brief report provides an overview of ICTIR 2023 and introduces the student reviewer program, which provides an opportunity for the students to understand and contribute to the conference review process. Date: 23 July 2023. Website: https://sigir.org/ictir2023/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Seventh International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story'24) was held on March 24th, 2024, in conjunction with the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024) in Glasgow, Scotland. Over the day, more than 50 attendees engaged in discussions and presentations focused on recent advancements in narrative representation, extraction, and generation. The workshop featured two invited keynote addresses, fourteen research paper presentations, and a poster session. The workshop proceedings are available online.1 Date: 24 March 2024. Website: https://text2story24.inesctec.pt/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First International Workshop on Graph-Based Approaches in Information Retrieval (IRonGraphs 2024) was held as a physical (in-person) event on March 24, 2024, in conjunction with the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024) in Glasgow (Scotland). The scientific program included paper, spotlight, and poster presentations. Two keynote talks were delivered by Francesco Fabbri (Spotify, Spain) and Ruihong Qiu (University of Queensland, Australia). This report presents an overview of the activities conducted during the workshop and the main topics covered. Date: 24 March 2024. Website: https://irongraphs.github.io/ecir2024/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With an increasing amount of information being created, stored and distributed in digital formats, preservation of digital information is a central concern. A recent wave of literature addressing the subject has focused on the fragility of digital media, technological obsolescence and standards, but little attention has been given to the most critical barrier in the preservation of digital information-- the potential conflicts between the new reality of digital information and expectations of people. Trust is a fundamental concept pervading every aspect of one's daily lives. It is also fragile. As trust declines, people are increasingly unwilling to take risks. They demand greater protections against possible failures and may be slower to adopt new technologies. The cost of electronically storing documents is dipping below the cost of storing paper documents containing the same information. The cost and convenience advantages of digital archiving are compelling, but realizing the full benefits requires solutions to an issue as old as humanity and as new as the "next thing": trust. INSET: How the Survey Was Done.

Greetings SIGIR Members! SIGIR in Taipei was a success. A big thank you to the general chairs Hsin-Hsi Chen, Wei-Jou (Edward) Duh, and Hen-Hsen Huang, for putting on a great conference, in a beautiful venue. Thank you also to the Program Chairs Makoto Kato, Josiane Mothe and Barbara Poblete for the excellent technical programming! We would like to congratulate the Best Paper winners Maik Fröbe, Jan Heinrich Reimer, Sean MacAvaney, Niklas Deckers, Simon Reich, Janek Bevendorff, Benno Stein, Matthias Hagen, and Martin Potthast for their paper The Information Retrieval Experiment Platform. We would also like to congratulate Alireza Salemi, Juan Altmayer Pizzorno, and Hamed Zamani whose paper A Symmetric Dual Encoding Dense Retrieval Framework for Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering won the Best Student Paper Award at SIGIR this year. Preparations for SIGIR 2024 in Washington DC are well underway, as preparations for SIGIR 2025 in Padua are beginning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 4th joint BIRNDL workshop was held at the 42nd ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2019) in Paris, France. BIRNDL 2019 intended to stimulate IR researchers and digital library professionals to elaborate on new approaches in natural language processing, information retrieval, scientometrics, and recommendation techniques that can advance the state-of-the-art in scholarly document understanding, analysis, and retrieval at scale. The workshop incorporated different paper sessions and the 5th edition of the CL-SciSumm Shared Task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The CHIIR 2023 conference was conducted as a hybrid event in Austin, TX, USA, attracting over 110 attendees both physically and virtually. The main conference program spanned over three days and comprised of single-track presentations. Two workshops were organized on the day prior to the main conference, while the doctoral consortium and tutorial took place one day after the main event. This report has been prepared by the conference General Co-Chairs. Date: 19--23 March 2023. Website: https://sigir.org/chiir2023/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The annual International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) conference is the world's leading research forum on processing, searching, organizing and accessing music-related data. The 23rd International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2022) was held from 04--08 December, 2022 at the National Science Seminar Complex, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India. ISMIR 2022 is the first ever ISMIR conference to take place in India. Due to the changing global landscape as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 23rd ISMIR conference became the first hybrid ISMIR conference, with both in-person and remote participants. The scientific program of the single-track conference comprised two keynotes, 113 research papers, six tutorials, 13 music pieces and five special sessions. The conference also included a Women in MIR (WiMIR) plenary session, industry presentations, a late-breaking/demo session, five satellite events, and multiple social events that showcased the rich musical and cultural heritage of India. In this report, we present a summary of the event, highlighting some unique challenges we faced organizing the hybrid conference and reflecting on the event for future improvements. Date: 04--08 December 2022. Website: https://ismir2022.ismir.net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an overview on task-guided scientific knowledge retrieval as a way for researchers to overcome the limitations of human cognitive capacity that in the age of explosive digital information creates a cognitive bottleneck. Topics include prototypes of task-guided scientific knowledge retrieval, as well as a look at novel representations, tools, and services and a review of systems that aid researchers in all aspects of scientific inquiry and discovery.

The first edition of the workshop on Generative Information Retrieval (Gen-IR 2023) took place in July 2023 in a hybrid fashion, co-located with the ACM SIGIR Conference 2023 in Taipei (SIGIR 2023). The aim was to bring information retrieval researchers together around the topic of generative AI that gathered attention in 2022 and 2023 with large language models and diffusion models. Given the novelty of the topic, the workshop was focused around multi-sided discussions, namely panels and poster sessions of the accepted proceedings papers. Two main research outcomes are the proceedings of the workshop1 and the potential research directions discussed in this report. Date: 27 July 2023. Website: https://coda.io/@sigir/gen-ir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This workshop report presents the output of the fifth Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) workshop, which has been co-located with the 39th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017) in Aberdeen, UK. We motivate our workshop and outline the papers (one keynote, six regular papers and five poster papers) presented at BIR 2017. Finally, we conclude with an outlook and future directions of this workshop activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sixth International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story'23) was held on April 2nd, 2023, in conjunction with the 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023) in Dublin, Ireland. Continuing the tradition of past years, the workshop was held as a hybrid event. Online participation was allowed using the Zoom platform. During the course of the day, more than 50 attendees had the opportunity to follow up and discuss the recent advances in topics related to representation, extraction, and generation of narratives. The workshop program included two invited keynotes and nineteen paper presentations. The proceedings of the workshop are available online 1. Date: 2 April 2023. Website: https://text2story23.inesctec.pt/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first edition of the International Workshop on Implicit Author Characterization from Texts for Search and Retrieval (IACT'23) was held on July 27th, 2023, in conjunction with the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) in Taipei, Taiwan. To support both online and in-person participation, the workshop was held as a hybrid event. Online participation was allowed using the EventX platform. During the course of the day, about 15 attendees had the opportunity to follow up and discuss the recent advances in topics related to identifying and extracting implicit information about authors (e.g., human or AI) from texts and using it in IR tasks. The workshop program included two invited keynotes, four paper presentations, and the report of the ColiE competition which was held as a part of the workshop1. The proceedings of the workshop are available online at https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3477/. Date: 27 July 2023. Website: https://en.sce.ac.il/news/iact23. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2023 ACM SIGIR Annual Business Meeting took place as a hybrid event during the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in Taipei on July 26, 2023. The business meeting was led by the chair of the SIGIR Executive Committee (EC), Vanessa Murdock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present here a short report on the French Information Retrieval Conference CORIA 2024, held in La Rochelle, France, on the 3rd and 4th of April 2024. We describe the objectives of the CORIA and provide an overview of the event, the submissions, and the keynotes. Date: 3--4 April 2024. Website: http://coria.asso-aria.org/2024/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Fifth International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story'22) was held on the April 10th, 2022, in conjunction with the 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2022) in Stavanger, Norway. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions that are still active in some countries, the workshop was held as an hybrid event, combining a "live" in-person and a "virtual" online participation. The online participation was allowed using the Zoom platform. During the course of the day, more than 50 attendees - about 40 in person and 10 in zoom - had the opportunity to follow-up and discuss the recent advances in topics related to representation, extraction, and generation of narratives. The workshop program included two invited keynotes and twelve paper presentations. The proceedings of the workshop are available online at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3117/ Date: 10 April, 2022. Website: https://text2story22.inesctec.pt/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To foster collaboration and knowledge transfer between the fields of bibliometrics / scientometrics / informetrics on the one hand and information retrieval on the other hand, we successfully ran a workshop series on bibliometric-enhanced information retrieval (BIR). This workshop report presents the BIR 2016 workshop, which has been co-located with ECIR for the third time this year. We motivate our workshop and outline the papers (one keynote and seven regular papers) presented at ECIR 2016 in Padua, Italy. Finally we reflect on past BIR workshops and conclude with an outlook of future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the machine learning community paused in a moment of self-reflection. In a widelydiscussed paper at ICLR 2018, Sculley et al. [13] wrote: "We observe that the rate of empirical advancement may not have been matched by consistent increase in the level of empirical rigor across the field as a whole." Their primary complaint is the development of a "research and publication culture that emphasizes wins" (emphasis in original), which typically means "demonstrating that a new method beats previous methods on a given task or benchmark". An apt description might be "leaderboard chasing"-and for many vision and NLP tasks, this isn't a metaphor. There are literally centralized leaderboards1 that track incremental progress, down to the fifth decimal point, some persisting over years, accumulating dozens of entries. Sculley et al. remind us that "the goal of science is not wins, but knowledge". The structure of the scientific enterprise today (pressure to publish, pace of progress, etc.) means that "winning" and "doing good science" are often not fully aligned. To wit, they cite a number of papers showing that recent advances in neural networks could very well be attributed to mundane issues like better hyperparameter optimization. Many results can't be reproduced, and some observed improvements might just be noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval workshop series (BIR) at ECIR tackled issues related to academic search, at the crossroads between Information Retrieval and Bibliometrics. BIR is a hot topic investigated by both academia (e.g., ArnetMiner, CiteSeerχ, Doc-Ear) and the industry (e.g., Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Semantic Scholar). This report presents the 8th iteration of the one-day BIR workshop held at ECIR 2019 in Cologne, Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost all of the important literature on Information Retrieval (IR) is published in subscription-based journals and digital libraries. We argue that the lack of open access publishing in IR is seriously hampering progress and inclusiveness of the field. We propose that the IR community starts working on a road map for transitioning the IR literature to a fully, "diamond", open access model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The large scale of scholarly publications poses a challenge for scholars in information seeking and sensemaking. Bibliometric, information retrieval (IR), text mining, and NLP techniques could help in these activities, but are not yet widely used in digital libraries. The BIRNDL workshop was held at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2016) in Newark, NJ. It intended to stimulate IR researchers and digital library professionals to elaborate on new approaches in natural language processing, information retrieval, scientometric, and recommendation techniques that can advance the state-of-the-art in scholarly document understanding, analysis, and retrieval at scale. The workshop incorporated three paper sessions and the 2nd edition of the CL-SciSumm Shared Task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author focuses on CyberAll project to encode, store and allow easy retrieval of all of a person's information for personal and professional use. Information is held in multiple formats to increase the likelihood for long-term retrievability. CyberAll archive includes books, CDs, correspondence, transactions, papers, photos and albums, and video; currently held in the Windows file system. The goal of the CyberAll project is to understand the problems of coping with the exponential increase in the amount of information that is becoming part of both personal and professional lives and encode everything and eliminate paper that is used for storage and transmission. There are a plethora of functions that can be invented to facilitate filing, labeling, and retrieval. The author has also used descriptive file names to aid retrieval. A name might include subject, organization, keywords and a date. It is forecasted that within the next decade personal computers will be capable of storing a terabyte of information on an individual machine. The author concludes that a system such as CyberAll could quite possibly be a killer application for personal computers.

The article describes the working papers presented at the workshop on methods and algorithms to access data distributed over heterogeneous systems. The event was held in Brazil following the conference of the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. The paper "p2pDating: Real Life Inspired Semantic Overlay Networks for Web Search" was centered on a method for building an overlay network on the basis of the notion of peer-to-peer dating. On the other hand, a paper proposed a service oriented architecture for supporting searching and browsing in an hierarchical network. The paper "Distributed Processing of Conjunctive Queries" discusses experiment results regarding a parallel search engine that exploits a usual invested file index distributed according to a document partition scheme.

The article provides information on various working papers on information retrieval. The paper "Term-Weighting Approaches in Automatic Text Retrieval," by G. Salton and C. Buckley, demonstrates the importance of good weighting, explains the components to term weights, and defines the weighting nomenclature of Salton's magical automatic retrieval technique triples. On the other hand, authors of the paper "Indexing By Latent Semantic Indexing" use singular value decomposition to present the latent semantic indexing method to reduce the dimensionality of the original term-document matrix, thus, creating a smaller set of orthogonal factors. The paper "Natural Language Processing for Information Retrieval" argues for a research agenda to explore how natural language processing techniques could be used to improve information retrieval.

The 3rd joint BIRNDL workshop was held at the 41st ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2018) in Ann Arbor, USA. BIRNDL 2018 intended to stimulate IR researchers and digital library professionals to elaborate on new approaches in natural language processing, information retrieval, scientometrics, and recommendation techniques that can advance the state-of-the-art in scholarly document understanding, analysis, and retrieval at scale. The workshop incorporated three paper sessions and the 4th edition of the CL-SciSumm Shared Task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an insight into the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval workshop on estimation of query difficulty in Salvador, Brazil on August 19, 2005. One working paper deals with the automatic classification of queries by expected retrieval performance. Another work centered on predicting query performance in intranet search. One aim of the event was to promote the discussion on prediction of query difficulty in the information retrieval community.

The Joint Conference of the Information Retrieval Communities in Europe (CIRCLE 2020) is the first joint conference of the French, Italian, Spanish, and Swiss information retrieval communities. Although these communities had conceived the CIRCLE conference as a meeting and networking venue, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they had to make the conference as fully virtual event. Nonetheless, the three days of conference gathered interesting studies and research work on a wide range of topics on information retrieval, such as topic and document modelling, query and ranking refinement, information retrieval in e-government, social media, recommender systems, information retrieval evaluation, indexing and annotation, user profiling and interaction, frameworks and systems, and semantic extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Information Retrieval (IR) researchers, we not only develop algorithmic solutions to hard problems, but we also insist on a proper, multifaceted evaluation of ideas. The IR literature on the fundamental topic of retrieval and ranking, for instance, has a rich history of studying the effectiveness of indexes, retrieval algorithms, and complex machine learning rankers and, at the same time, quantifying their computational costs, from creation and training to application and inference. This is evidenced, for example, by more than a decade of research on efficient training and inference of large decision forest models in Learning to Rank (LtR). As we move towards even more complex, deep learning models in a wide range of applications, questions on efficiency have once again become relevant with renewed urgency. Indeed, efficiency is no longer limited to time- and space-efficiency; instead it has found new, challenging dimensions that stretch to resource-, sample- and energy-efficiency with ramifications for researchers, users, and the environment. As a step towards bringing together experts from industry and academia and creating a forum for a critical discussion and the promotion of efficiency in the era of Neural Information Retrieval (NIR), we held the ReNeuIR workshop on July 15th, 2022 as a hybrid event---in person in Madrid, Spain along with online attendees---in conjunction with ACM SIGIR 2022. Recognizing the importance of this topic, approximately 80 participants answered our call and attended the workshop over three sessions. The event included a total of two keynotes and eight paper presentations, and concluded with a lively discussion where participants helped identify gaps in existing research and brainstormed future research directions. We had consensus in recognizing that efficiency is not simply latency, that a holistic, concrete definition of efficiency is needed to guide researchers and reviewers alike, and that more research is necessary in the development of efficiency-centered evaluation metrics and standard benchmark datasets, platforms, and tools. Date: 15 July, 2022. Website: https://ReNeuIR.org. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Joint Conference of the Information Retrieval Communities in Europe (CIRCLE 2020) is the second joint conference of the French, Italian, and Spanish information retrieval communities. The three days of conference gathered interesting studies and research work on a wide range of topics on information retrieval, such as topic and document modeling, web search, information retrieval in e-government, social media, recommender systems, information retrieval evaluation, indexing and annotation, user profiling and interaction, frameworks and systems, and semantic extraction. It was hosted by Université de Toulouse, France in a holiday resort at Samatan. Date: 4--7 July, 2022. Website: https://www.irit.fr/CIRCLE/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2022 ACM SIG IR Annual Business Meeting took place as a hybrid event during the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in Madrid, Spain on July 14, 2022. The business meeting was led by the chair of the SIG IR Executive Committee (EC), Vanessa Murdock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on credibility of web content is becoming increasingly important due to low publishing barriers and resulting abundance of untrustworthy or conflicting information on the web. On the 30th October 2008 the 2nd Workshop on Information Credibility on the web was held as part of CIKM 2009 conference in Napa Valley, USA. Nine full and six short papers were accepted and grouped into four sessions. In addition, two keynote speeches have been delivered. This report outlines the main results of the workshop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First Search Futures Workshop, in conjunction with the Fourty-sixth European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) 2024, looked into the future of search to ask questions such as: • How can we harness the power of generative AI to enhance, improve and re-imagine Information Retrieval (IR)? • What are the principles and fundamental rights that the field of Information Retrieval should strive to uphold? • How can we build trustworthy IR systems in light of Large Language Models and their ability to generate content at super human speeds? • What new applications and affordances does generative AI offer and enable, and can we go back to the future, and do what we only dreamed of previously? The workshop started with seventeen lightning talks from a diverse set speakers. Instead of conventional paper presentations, the lightning talks provided a rapid and concise overview of ideas, allowing speakers to share critical points or novel concepts quickly. This format was designed to encourage discussion and introduce a wide range of topics within a short period, thereby maximising the exchange of ideas and ensuring that participants could gain insights into various future search areas without the deep dive typically required in longer presentations. This report, co-authored by the workshop's organisers and its participants, summarises the talks and discussions. This report aims to provide the broader IR community with the insights and ideas discussed and debated during the workshop - and to provide a platform for future discussion. Date: 24 March 2024. Website: https://searchfutures.github.io/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital newspapers explores Internet as a new medium of marketing. Marketing on the Internet presents an interesting challenge for those experimenting with the digital newspaper format since the interaction with the customer is computer-mediated. It is possible that newspaper organizations will use Internet technology to apply new marketing approaches in their efforts to promote themselves. The different approaches that digital newspapers uses for marketing are, traditional revenue forms for newspapers, combined with new revenue forms made possible by the digital document. Forms are traditional advertising and subscription rates, digital document enabled filtering and retrieval, enhancing of the distribution chain and market-making. An implication for designers and developers of digital newspapers is that the technology must be in place to support information retrieval and the customized packaging of information content. Once the technological sophistication matures, there will likely be a shift, as digital newspapers look to the content as means to generate additional opportunities.

The Third International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story'20 [https://text2story20.inesctec.pt/]) was held on the 14th of April 2020, in conjunction with the 42nd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2020). This year due to the Covid-19 outbreak the Text2Story workshop was held online on Zoom platform. During the course of the day, an average of more than 60 attendees had the opportunity to follow-up and discuss the recent advances in extraction and formal representation of narratives. The workshop consisted of two invited keynotes and thirteen paper presentations. The proceedings of the workshop are available online at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2593/ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Workshop on Algorithmic Bias in Search and Recommendation was held on April 14, 2020 in conjuction with the 42nd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2020). The scientific program included paper and demo presentations and a final discussion. The keynote was delivered by Prof Chirag Shah. This report presents an overview of the activities conducted during the workshop and the main topics covered in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simulation is used as a low-cost and repeatable means of experimentation. As Information Retrieval (IR) researchers, we are no strangers to the idea of using simulation within our own field---such as the traditional means of IR system evaluation as manifested through the Cranfield paradigm. While simulation has been used in other areas of IR research (such as the study of user behaviours), we argue that the potential for using simulation has been recognised by relatively few IR researchers so far. To this end, the Sim4IR workshop was held online on July 15th, 2021 in conjunction with ACM SIGIR 2021. Building on past efforts, the goal of the workshop was to create a forum for researchers and practitioners to promote methodology and development of more widespread use of simulation for IR evaluation. Around 80 participants took part over two sessions. A total of two keynotes, three original paper presentations, and eight 'encore talks' were presented. The main conclusions from the resultant discussion were that simulation has the potential to offer solutions to the limitations of existing evaluation methodologies, but there is more research needed toward developing realistic user simulators; and the development and sharing of simulators, in the form of toolkits and online services, is critical for successful uptake. Date: 15 July, 2021. Website: https://sim4ir.org. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Fourth International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story'21) was held on the April 1st, 2021, in conjunction with the 43rd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2021). Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, the workshop was held online on Zoom platform. During the course of the day, an average of more than 80 attendees had the opportunity to follow-up and discuss the recent advances in extraction and formal representation of narratives. The workshop consisted of two invited keynotes and ten paper presentations. The proceedings of the workshop are available online at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2860/ Date: 1 April, 2021. Website: https://text2story21.inesctec.pt/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The third workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval (GamifIR) took place on the 21th of July 2016 in conjunction with SIGIR 2016 in Pisa, Italy. It was the first GamifIR held in conjunction with the SIGIR, the first and second GamifIR workshops were both colocated with ECIR. The workshop program included one invited keynote presentation, seven paper presentations and a discussion session. The keynote presentation stated the necessity of proper theory for gamification design and resulting opportunities. The paper presentation covered studies on diverse areas and approaches for the application of gamification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Users interact with digital systems with some underlying tasks in their minds. In our research scope, a task can be either single or multi-staged. A single-staged task is associated with a single information need, whereas a multi-staged one is associated with more than one information needs. An example of a single-staged task is suggesting related papers to an author while they are writing a section of the research papers. An example of a multi-staged task is planning for a vacation, where the different underlying information needs could be 'places to visit', 'booking accommodation' etc. In the process of accomplishing their task objectives, a user often needs to interact with an information retrieval (IR) system to address one or more information needs. For instance, for writing a research paper on a chosen topic, a user needs to look for existing research work related to the topic. Traditional IR systems do not take into account a user's task intent while showing search results to the user. In our work, we propose a methodology towards developing next generation IR systems (i.e. proactive IR systems) which seek to anticipate the task intent of a user from their interactions with digital systems in order to proactively suggest potentially relevant information sources to assist them to complete their tasks. Specifically speaking, in this PhD, we proposed an embedding approach that captures the task semantics from the interactions of a user with a digital system (e.g. laptop, desktop, smartphone etc.). The proposed embedding approach is then applied for the downstream tasks of providing proactive suggestions in both single and multi staged scenarios. For the single-staged task, we propose a simulation setup to simulate a user's reading and writing interactions in a desktop environment. For the multi-staged task, we focus on web search sessions where a user can have multiple information needs corresponding to a search task. We also proposed a reproducible evaluation framework to compare between different proactive suggestion models. Awarded by: Dublin City University, Ireland on 10 August 2021. Supervised by: Gareth Jones. Available at: https://procheta.github.io/sprocheta/Thesis.pdf. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-commerce search and recommendation usually operate on structured data such as product catalogs and taxonomies. However, creating better search and recommendation systems often requires a large variety of unstructured data including customer reviews and articles on the web. Traditionally, the solution has always been converting unstructured data into structured data through information extraction, and conducting search over the structured data. However, this is a costly approach that often has low quality. In this paper, we envision a solution that does entirely the opposite. Instead of converting unstructured data (web pages, customer reviews, etc) to structured data, we instead convert structured data (product inventory, catalogs, taxonomies, etc) into textual data, which can be easily integrated into the text corpus that trains LLMs. Then, search and recommendation can be performed through a Q/A mechanism through an LLM instead of using traditional information retrieval methods over structured data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]