Informer: Winter 2022 Issue Out Now

Informer: Winter 2022 Issue Out Now

http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/

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 Chairman
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.

https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/microsoft-bcs-bcs-irsg-karen-sparck-jones-award-2021-for-dr-ivan-vulic/


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).

https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/exploring-information-retrieval-a-series-of-eight-isko-uk-bcs-irsg-ir-workshops/


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’.

https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/at-last-an-academic-deep-dive-into-an-enterprise-search-case-study/


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.

https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2022/01/brief-overview-of-the-portable-document-format-pdf-and-some-challenges-for-text-extraction/


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/

_____________________________________________________________________

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-odSCf/[email protected]
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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