http://probablyirrelevant.org Information Retrieval Research and Development Thu, 15 Jul 2010 20:43:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Thanks to your feedback, "...this study estimates that TREC’s existence was responsible for approximately one-third of an improvement of more than 200% in web search products that was observed between 1999 and 2009." More here. http://probablyirrelevant.org/2010/07/economic-impact-assessment-of-nist%e2%80%99s-text-retrieval-conference-trec-program/ SIGIR has posted best paper nominees. A comparison of general vs personalized affective models for the prediction of topical relevance, I. Arapakis, K. Athanasakos, J. Jose Assessing the Scenic Route: Measuring the Value of Search Trails in Web Logs, R. White, J. Huang Caching Search Engine Results over Incremental Indices, F. Junqueira, R. ... http://probablyirrelevant.org/2010/07/sigir-2010-best-paper-nominees/ About one year ago, Bruce Croft asked the IR community for help with getting access to query logs for academia, The goal of this project is to create a database of web search activity that will be provided to the information retrieval research community to use on current and future ... http://probablyirrelevant.org/2010/06/query-logs-and-information-retrieval-research/ A few years ago, someone published an online interface to many old Cornell/SMART tech reports from the Salton group.  Unfortunately, I cannot seem to find them anywhere now.  Who can help correct this irony? Update: Here is the SIGIR Digital Museum of Information Retrieval Research, including those SMART reports. http://probablyirrelevant.org/2010/05/vintage-cornellsmart-tech-reports/ 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/