975 research outputs found
Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)
The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017
Navigating Complex Search Tasks with AI Copilots
As many of us in the information retrieval (IR) research community know and
appreciate, search is far from being a solved problem. Millions of people
struggle with tasks on search engines every day. Often, their struggles relate
to the intrinsic complexity of their task and the failure of search systems to
fully understand the task and serve relevant results. The task motivates the
search, creating the gap/problematic situation that searchers attempt to
bridge/resolve and drives search behavior as they work through different task
facets. Complex search tasks require more than support for rudimentary fact
finding or re-finding. Research on methods to support complex tasks includes
work on generating query and website suggestions, personalizing and
contextualizing search, and developing new search experiences, including those
that span time and space. The recent emergence of generative artificial
intelligence (AI) and the arrival of assistive agents, or copilots, based on
this technology, has the potential to offer further assistance to searchers,
especially those engaged in complex tasks. There are profound implications from
these advances for the design of intelligent systems and for the future of
search itself. This article, based on a keynote by the author at the 2023 ACM
SIGIR Conference, explores these issues and charts a course toward new horizons
in information access guided by AI copilots.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure
Multimedia question answering
Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH
ACQUA: Automated Community-based Question Answering through the Discretisation of Shallow Linguistic Features
This paper addresses the problem of determining the best answer in Community-based Question Answering (CQA) websites by focussing on the content. In particular, we present a novel system, ACQUA (http://acqua.kmi.open.ac.uk), that can be installed onto the majority of browsers as a plugin. The service offers a seamless and accurate prediction of the answer to be accepted. Our system is based on a novel approach for processing answers in CQAs. Previous research on this topic relies on the exploitation of community feedback on the answers, which involves rating of either users (e.g., reputation) or answers (e.g. scores manually assigned to answers). We propose a new technique that leverages the content/textual features of answers in a novel way. Our approach delivers better results than related linguistics-based solutions and manages to match rating-based approaches. More specifically, the gain in performance is achieved by rendering the values of these features into a discretised form. We also show how our technique manages to deliver equally good results in real-time settings, as opposed to having to rely on information not always readily available, such as user ratings and answer scores. We ran an evaluation on 21 StackExchange websites covering around 4 million questions and more than 8 million answers. We obtain 84% average precision and 70% recall, which shows that our technique is robust, effective, and widely applicable
Report on the future conversations workshop at CHIIR 2021
The Future Conversations workshop at CHIIR’21 looked to the future of search, recommen- dation, and information interaction to ask: where are the opportunities for conversational interactions? What do we need to do to get there? Furthermore, who stands to benefit?The workshop was hands-on and interactive. Rather than a series of technical talks, we solicited position statements on opportunities, problems, and solutions in conversational search in all modalities (written, spoken, or multimodal). This paper –co-authored by the organisers and participants of the workshop– summarises the submitted statements and the discussions we had during the two sessions of the workshop. Statements discussed during the workshop are available at https://bit.ly/FutureConversations2021Statements
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