In case you missed it, here are details of the latest issue of Informer, which just came out this week. This is again one of our bigger issues, with around a dozen articles including conference reviews, feature articles, news and updates from the world of search and information retrieval. This one features extended coverage of Search Solutions 2021 and the Industry Awards along with feature articles on text extraction from PDFs and empirical studies of enterprise search. For further details see the Informer website. If you fancy becoming a contributor, get in touch!
Informer: Winter 2022 Issue Out Now
In the Winter issue
By Martin White on 18th January 2022
November 2021 was a very busy time for IRSG. The Search Solutions Conference took place virtually on 24 November. You can read reports on the conference and on the two tutorials in this issue. There is also a list of the BCS Search Industry Awards that were announced at the Conference. Continuing the ‘awards’ theme the winner of the 2021 Karen Spärk Jones award is Dr Ivan Vulić (University of Cambridge). IRSG is a partner with UKeiG in the selection of the Strix award. The Strix Award Lecture this year was given by Professor Ian Ruthven.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/in-the-winter-issue/
From Udo Kruschwitz – BCS IRSG Chair
By Udo Kruschwitz on 18th January 2022
Happy New Year everybody! It is a pleasure for me to contribute a few words in my role as chair of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group. This is my second year of term, and we are looking back at another turbulent year — who would have thought that in autumn 2021 we would have to revert back to online conferences, meetings and teaching (apart from the experts, that is)? As a result we also had to make our annual Search Solutions event fully virtual. This also applied to our annual general meeting (AGM) which was co-located with Search Solutions.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/from-udo-kruschwitz-bcs-irsg-chairman-2/
Search Solutions 2021 – conference report
By Martin White on 18th January 2022
Looking back at the ten papers and two panel discussions at the BCS IRSG Search Solutions 2021 conference in November there was a very strong theme that emerged with most of the papers providing a set of variations. The theme at its most basic was that ‘one size does not fit all’, especially when it comes to the user interface. The underlying issues were presented by Professor Katriina Byström (University of Oslo) who started by summarising the work she had undertaken with Sanna Kumpulainen (Tampere University) on vertical and horizontal relationships amongst task-based information needs.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/search-solutions-2021-conference-report/
Search Solutions 2021 – Tutorials report
By Martin White on 18th January 2022
As has been the custom, the main Search Solutions 2021 event has again been preceded by a day of tutorials. Two tutorials were successfully delivered on the day: an introduction to Natural Language Processing and a “Practitioners’ Evaluation Roundtable” (which was not a tutorial in the strict sense).
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/search-solutions-2021-tutorials-report/
BCS Search Industry Awards 2021
By Martin White on 18th January 2022
At the BCS IRSG Search Solutions 2021 Conference on 24 November there was a session during which the BCS Search Industry Awards for 2021 were presented by Tony Russell-Rose on behalf of the IRSG Committee. The Conference was once again (and hopefully for the last time!) virtual so there was no opportunity to applaud the winners.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/bcs-search-industry-awards-2021-2/
Microsoft-BCS/BCS-IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award 2021 for Dr Ivan Vulić
By Martin White on 18th January 2022
Dr Ivan Vulić from the University of Cambridge has been named as the winner of the Microsoft-BCS/BCS-IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award 2021
The award, which is sponsored by Microsoft Research, was created in 2008 to remember Professor Karen Spärck Jones FBA, a leading researcher in information retrieval at what was at the time called the Cambridge “Mathematical Laboratory”. In a landmark 1972 paper, she discovered the utility of inverse document (collection) frequency (IDF), an important factor now standard in ranked document retrieval as used by most search systems.
Strix Lecture 2021 – 9 December 2021
By Steven Zimmerman on 18th January 2022
The annual Tony Kent Strix Annual Memorial Lecture was held on December 9th. The lecture was given by the 2020 Strix Award winner Ian Ruthven (Professor, University of Strahtclyde). He delivered his journey of research over the past 20 years where attendees learned that many of his contributions were through collaborative efforts with many researchers in the IR community, to which he expressed much gratitude for their efforts. His talk was titled “Google’s what you use when Alexa doesn’t know the answer, Uncle Ian”.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/strix-lecture-2021-9-december-2021/
IRSG 2021-2022 AGM Committee Elections
By Steven Zimmerman on 18th January 2022
The IRSG Annual General Meeting (AGM) took place immediately after Search Solutions 2021, where the committee election results were announced.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/irsg-2021-2022-agm-committee-elections/
ECIR 2022 10-14 April – the latest news
By Martin White on 18th January 2022
The 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR’22) will be held in Stavanger, Norway, between April 10 and 14, 2022. It will be the northern-most location in the history of ECIR, with the Norwegian fjord region offering some of the most majestic and spectacular scenery in the world. With its intimate and mostly pedestrian centre, the city is a truly unique destination, surrounded by mountains, beaches and the sea.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/ecir-2022-10-14-april-the-latest-news/
Exploring Information Retrieval – A series of eight ISKO UK / BCS IRSG IR workshops
By Martin White on 18th January 2022
Following requests from attendees to the ISKO UK KO-ED classes (part of the programme Knowledge Organization Education) ISKO UK ran two workshops in the Autumn: the first one on vocabulary control with Sylvie Davis and the second one on the UDC with Aida Slavic. The last of the three workshops “Practical Thesaurus Construction” with Stella Dextre Clarke takes place in January 2022.
KO-ED events continue in February and March 2022 with a series of weekly lectures entitled “Exploring Information Retrieval“. The series is organised by Aida Slavic and Martin White in collaboration with the Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) of the British Computer Society (BCS).
At last – an academic deep dive into an enterprise search case study
By Martin White on 18th January 2022
The opening presentation at Search Solutions 2021 in November given by Professor Katriina Byström (Oslo Metropolitan University) in which she summarised the outcomes of research she had carried out with Professor Marianne Lykke, Ann Bygholm and Louise Bak Søndergaard ( Department of Communications and Psychology at Aalborg University) on enterprise search use across an organisation. The paper was published in Journal of Documentation in late December under the title of ‘The role of historical and contextual knowledge in enterprise search’.
Brief Overview of the Portable Document Format (PDF) and Some Challenges for Text Extraction
By Martin White on 18th January 2022
(Note from the Editor PDF files are so ubiquitous in business and in academia that few people give any thought to the problems that arise in extracting text from a PDF to incorporate into a search index. Tim Allison is a consultant working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and has been at the forefront of understanding the causes of the problems and finding solutions. As you will see this very detailed analysis contains a substantial number of images, and so I have taken the decision to publish the introduction in HTML but then provide a link to the full paper as (ironically!) a PDF file.
Book review – Invisible Search and Online Search Engines
By Cass Zhixue Zhao on 18th January 2022
Invisible Search and Online Search Engines will be an excellent start for new learners and researchers in the area of information retrieval, search engines and librarianship. It also works well as an exciting book for readers interested in search engines and searching behaviours online nowadays. It not only gives a broad overview of online searching but also incorporates a review of the history of information retrieval and librarianship.
The history is told in a story-telling tone rather than a textbook tone. After finishing the book, you will have a general idea of how different concepts and areas, such as librarian, information seeking, information retrieval and information behaviour, are linked. You will have your own idea of why a certain area in search has evolved in such a way.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/book-review-invisible-search-and-online-search-engines/
Events Spring 2022
By Andy Macfarlane on 18th January 2022
Note: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic some events have been cancelled, postponed or will be run virtually. We have provided information on each of the events with the current status at the time of writing. Please check the URL of the event for further details.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/events-spring-2022/
ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2022
By Martin White on 18th January 2022
The annual ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) is the primary international event for the inter- and multi-disciplinary community of academics and practitioners in digital libraries coming from computer, information and social sciences, and other related disciplines such as information retrieval.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/acm-ieee-joint-conference-on-digital-libraries-jcdl-2022/
And finally….from the Editor
By Martin White on 18th January 2022
During the closing panel session of the Search Solutions conference in November Professor Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow) highlighted the need to keep graduate and undergraduate courses updated in line with the very rapid developments in IR theory, development and practice. Around this time there was a Twitter thread about what might be the best textbooks to read to gain an introduction to IR. The most mentioned book in the replies was Introduction to Information Retrieval (Manning, Raghaven and Schütze 2010).
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/and-finally-from-the-editor-4/
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Opportunities for Authors
If you are an expert in information retrieval or any aspect of search who has strong writing skills, we invite you to contribute to Informer. Please send an article proposal to us at: irsg@bcs.org.
For more information about the BCS IRSG, please go to: http://irsg.bcs.org/about.php
About Informer
Informer is the quarterly newsletter of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG). Its aim is to provide insights and inspiration to researchers and professionals working in all aspects of search and information retrieval. Our articles provide accessible and timely coverage of important topics, ranging from focused, practical advice, to concise overviews of broader topics, and to deeper, research-oriented articles and opinion pieces.
The IRSG is a Specialist Group of BCS. Its mission is to provide a focus for the European IR community, facilitate communication between researchers and practitioners and promote the adoption of IR research within industry. We host a major European conference (ECIR) and provide an associated programme of workshops, seminars and events. The IRSG is free to join via the BCS website, which provides access to further IR articles, events and resources.
BCS is the industry body for IT professionals. With members in over 100 countries around the world, BCS is the leading professional and learned society in the field of computers and information systems.
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