http://probablyirrelevant.org Information Retrieval Research and Development Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:52:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There is a survey being conducted about the impact of TREC on information retrieval research.  This feedback is important for organizers and I encourage researchers to participate.  If you are outside of the IR community and have ever used TREC collections, this is feedback is also valuable. http://probablyirrelevant.org/2010/02/trec-survey/ I've been watching with interest as Apple's iphone/ipod_touch app store has grown and matured over the last couple of year (yes, I know, me and almost everyone else).  Interacting with apps on my own, and more recently, building a few, has started me thinking about what I perceive to be an ... http://probablyirrelevant.org/2009/09/micro-ir/ We recently heard our poster on online forum search was accepted to SIGIR 09, and I've been wanting to post something about the test setup we used in that study. There's no existing IR test collection for such a task, although some similar datasets do exist. For various reasons ... http://probablyirrelevant.org/2009/04/finding-relevance-judgements-in-the-wild/ SIGIR Poster decisions have been mailed. Full paper decisions should be soon as well. Authors are encouraged to post preprints/drafts of accepted publications in the comments section. PAPERS The program committee reviewed 494 full paper submissions and accepted 78, about a 16% acceptance rate. In 2008, 497 submitted, 85 accepted, about ... http://probablyirrelevant.org/2009/04/sigir-2009-accepted-papers-thread/ Conference URLs: SIGIR 2009 Homepage SIGIR 2009 Facebook Event Important Dates: Jan 19, 2009 Abstracts for full research papers due Jan 26, 2009 Full research paper submissions due Feb 2, 2009 Workshop proposals due Feb 23, 2009 Posters, demonstration, and tutorial proposals due Mar 2, 2009 Doctoral consortium proposals due Mar 9, 2009 Notification of workshop acceptances Apr 11, 2009 All other acceptance notification http://probablyirrelevant.org/2008/12/sigir-2009-information/ In his keynote at the Search in Social Media workshop at CIKM, Andrew Tomkins suggested that there is plenty of room for academic IR research progress in social media.  I happen to agree. Community generated content has been all the rage for a few years: blogs, Wikipedia, online forums, twitter, Yahoo! Answers, ... http://probablyirrelevant.org/2008/11/directions-in-search-over-social-media/ I’m just back from the annual meeting of ASIST (American Society for Info Science and Technology) in Columbus, OH.   I gave a talk during one of the five sessions on IR, and after all the speakers were through there was a session of audience questions.  Andrew Dillon lobbed a provocative ... http://probablyirrelevant.org/2008/10/is-the-science-of-ir-improving/ WSDM 2009 accepted papers posted here. http://probablyirrelevant.org/2008/10/wsdm-accepted-papers-posted/ Several recent (and several not so recent) papers have focused on methods of evaluating IR systems without relevance judgments.  The appeal of this approach is obvious; forming relevance judgments is arguably the hardest part of building a test collection.  Additionally, ranking systems without judgments has implications for fusion-based IR where ... http://probablyirrelevant.org/2008/09/what-is-different-about-highly-effective-retrievals/ In 2006, I was studying information retrieval at the University of Massachusetts and, during a Friday of extreme impatience, I installed WordPress, started apached and created a blog called “Information Retrieval”. After a handful of posts over the course of six months, the comments queue filled with spam and ... http://probablyirrelevant.org/2008/09/blogs-queries-corpora/