Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting Maik Fröbe @maik-froebe.bsky.social, from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, who was invited to give a guest lecture and a talk to our group about his recent work on evaluation in information retrieval.
Congrats!
Dr Sean MacAvaney receives the Best Search Project of the Year Award at the BCS Search Industry Awards on Wednesday 26 November.
PyTerrier, a software platform developed at
@uofgcompsci.bsky.social which helps facilitate the development of AI-powered search engines, has won a national award from @wearebcs.bsky.social!
Read more here: www.gla.ac.uk/news/headlin...
We just released "German Commons", the largest openly-licensed German text dataset for LLM training: 154B tokens with clear usage rights for research and commercial use.
huggingface.co/datasets/coral-nlp/german-commons
Harrie on stage
Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval workshop #DIR3025 today in Nijmegen! Opening by the great Harrie Oosterhuis
https://informagus.nl/dir2025/schedule
Check out the slides from our SCAI'2025 #convsearch workshop collocated with @ijcai.org #IJCAI2025 on LLMs, retrieval & QA, recommendations, negotiations, evaluation and transparency
scai.info/scai-2025
@patuchen.bsky.social @maik-froebe.bsky.social @tuetschek.bsky.social @mila-quebec.bsky.social
🌟Really excited to share the fourth Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval (SWIRL) report published in SIGIR Forum!
Paper 👉🏻 www.johannetrippas.com/papers/tripp...
More info 👉🏻 sites.google.com/view/swirl20...
#SWIRL2025 #SIGIR2026 #IR #GenAI #Research #CHIIR2026
Some exciting news! 🤗 After 3 amazing years at TREC, the Tip-of-the-Tongue (ToT) shared task will be a core task at NTCIR-19 in 2026. The new track will focus on tip-of-the-tongue information needs in English and East Asian languages.
More details coming soon. See you all in Tokyo next year!
Hello TREC-ToTers! 👋🏽
📆 Good news! We are extending the run submission deadline by 2 weeks. Please submit your runs by **September 10 (Wednesday)** and spread the word.
More info: trec-tot.github.io/guidelines
#TREC2025 #TRECToT #TREC2025ToT
Gentle reminder 📢
All run submissions for the Tip-of-the-Tongue (ToT) Track are due next week Wednesday (Aug 27).
More info: trec-tot.github.io/guidelines
#TREC2025 #TRECToT #TREC2025ToT
Here are some impressions from our ReNeuIR workshop on "Reaching Efficiency in Neural IR" that we had yesterday at #SIGIR2025.
Happy to share that our paper "The Viability of Crowdsourcing for RAG Evaluation" received the Best Paper Honourable Mention at #SIGIR2025! Very grateful to the community for recognizing our work on improving RAG evaluation.
📄 webis.de/publications...
Now @fschlatt.bsky.social presents "TITE: Token-Independent Text Encoder for Information Retrieval" at #SIGIR2025
Paper: webis.de/publications...
Want to know how to make bi-encoders more than 3x faster with a new backbone encoder model? Check out our talk on the Token-Independent Text Encoder (TITE) #SIGIR2025 in the efficiency track. It pools vectors within the model to improve efficiency dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
To Eun Kim just presented the work on "Tip of the Tongue Query Elicitation for Simulated Evaluation" at #SIGIR2025. The approach will be used in the #TREC2025 Tip-of-the-Tongue track, and we had some sweets at the poster :)
The paper is available online: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Lukas Gienapp presents "The Viability of Crowdsourcing for RAG Evaluation" at #SIGIR2025
The paper is available at: webis.de/publications...
@mrparryparry.bsky.social presenting our work on reproducing TREC DL 2019 judgements and the implications for evaluating modern ranking models on modern collections. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.20937
Here are some of the statistics that I found very interesting from the #SIGIR2025 opening session. (Over 1000 attendees!)
Hello TREC-ToTers!
We have released the test queries for the TREC 2025 Tip-of-the-Tongue (TREC-ToT) Track. Please see the guidelines for more information: trec-tot.github.io/guidelines. Run submission deadline will tentatively be in August. #TREC2025 #TRECToT #TREC2025ToT
Please spread the word!
Thank you Carlos for the shout-out of Lightning IR in the LSR tutorial at #SIGIR2025
If you want to fine your own LSR models, check out our framework at github.com/webis-de/lig...
Djoerd Hiemstra proudly holding a copy of the first issue
Never seen our editor in chief, Djoerd Hiemstra, more happy than today, holding a copy of the first issue of #IRRJ
Dory from finding nemo with the quote: "I remember it like it was yesterday. Of course, I dont remember yesterday."
Do not forget to participate in the #TREC2025 Tip-of-the-Tongue (ToT) Track :)
The corpus and baselines (with run files) are now available and easily accessible via the ir_datasets API and the HuggingFace Datasets API.
More details are available at: trec-tot.github.io/guidelines
Cool, congratulations! 🥳🥳
The deadline for submissions to the ReNeuIR workshop at #SIGIR2025 is extended to June 10 😸
Details: reneuir.org
#ReNeuIr2025 #SIGIR25
Hello TREC-ToTers! 👋🏽
Excited to announce the release of TREC 2025 Tip-of-the-Tongue (TREC-ToT) Track guidelines: trec-tot.github.io/guidelines. We will release test queries in July and run submission deadline will be in August. #TREC2025 #TRECToT #TREC2025ToT
Please register to participate:
Today I had the pleasure to talk about child-safe search at #ECIR2025. We created an cranfield-style evaluation dataset to contrast relevance with harm in web search scenarios.
Details: webis.de/publications...
The Workshop on Open Web Search just finished #WOWS2025 #ECIR2025.
It was a very cool experience with many interesting talks. Lets hope we can do it again next year at #ECIR2026 in Delft :)
