Do those findings about commenters apply to Bluesky also? :)

"From Foundations to GPT in Text Classification: A Comprehensive Survey on Current Approaches and Future Trends", the latest review article from FnTIR www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...

Is Google search getting worse? Maybe what we want from it has changed Has the simple search become less useful in a world of low-information, SEO-optimised sites, and often faulty AI summaries? Are there better ways to navigate the web?

Are search engines getting worse—or is it time to rethink how we search? ADM+S researchers Oleg Zendel, Ashwin Nagappa & Johanne Trippas share insights on search quality, AI & what it means for how we find trustworthy information online @olegzendel.bsky.social @ashwinnag.bsky.social bit.ly/3F8sx44

Excellent presentation by @admscentre.org.au @rmitcomputing.bsky.social master’s student Kun Ran m at #chiir2025

@marwahalaofi.com @iroldie.bsky.social

www.damianospina.com/publication/...

What makes a good search engine? These 4 models can help you use search in the age of AI To make sure search engines serve us well, it’s helpful to imagine these tools having different roles – whether it’s a “librarian” or a “teacher”.

Our @theconversation.com article discussing 4 ethical models of search engines is out!

theconversation.com/what-makes-a...

@admscentre.org.au
@rmitcomputing.bsky.social
@umbrellacorpn.bsky.social

I guess I find it hard to get behind an article that tells me that we're all going to hell and there's nothing we can do about. There's loads of things that we can do about it and a heck of a lot of people are doing things right now.

"Two Heads Are Better Than One: Improving Search Effectiveness Through LLM Generated Query Variants", preprint is up marksanderson.org/publications... Awesome work by @rmitcomputing.bsky.social Masters student @rankun203.bsky.social with Marwah Alaofi and @damianospina.com Presented ACM CHIIR.

Provocative? Negative more like. I don't pretend that there aren't serious problems, but people and institutions are working hard to address the problems and that work isn't mentioned once in there.

Exclusive: These universities have the most retracted scientific articles A first-of-its-kind analysis by Nature reveals which institutions are retraction hotspots.

For the first time, Nature publishes a list of "retraction hotspots": academic institutions where a great many papers have been withdrawn post publication. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The TREC website has been updated for the first time in... decades? Looking good. trec.nist.gov/index.html

Illusions of Relevance: Using Content Injection Attacks to Deceive Retrievers, Rerankers, and LLM Judges Consider a scenario in which a user searches for information, only to encounter texts flooded with misleading or non-relevant content. This scenario exemplifies a simple yet potent vulnerability in ne...

"Illusions of Relevance: Using Content Injection Attacks to Deceive Retrievers, Rerankers, and LLM Judges". Inject unrelated toxic content into a relevant passage, an LLM judge still says the passage is relevant arxiv.org/abs/2501.18536 from Manveer Tamber & Jimmy Lin.

"Multi-stage Large Language Model Pipelines Can Outperform GPT-4o in Relevance Assessment" w/@Julian S. @danulah.bsky.social @umbrellacorpn.bsky.social accepted at #webconf2025! 😱🌟

We present an LLM-based pipeline that boosts relevance assessment accuracy through modular classification.
#SIGIR2025

2024 ACM Fellows Celebrated for transformative contributions to computing science and technology. ACM has named 55 of its members ACM for transformative contributions to computing science and technology. All the 2024 inductees are longstanding ACM Members whose accomplishments were selected by the...

Two SIGIR Information Retrieval greats were made ACM Fellows this year: Maarten de Rijke and Justin Zobel. Many congratulations to both! www.acm.org/media-center...

Building on four successful workshops in the last few years, it was decided to create the Inaugural SEASON conference of the Search Engines and Society Network, starting in 2025. Submissions, April 30th. Held in Hamburg. easychair.org/cfp/SEASON2025

Thanks @hscells.bsky.social for pointing me to this

Using LLMs for pairwise relevance decisions, I haven't seen that tried before, but it makes perfect sense to try them here. My impression is that pairwise relevance hasn't been used much in the past because of the cost of lablelling.

LLM-based relevance assessment still can't replace human relevance assessment The use of large language models (LLMs) for relevance assessment in information retrieval has gained significant attention, with recent studies suggesting that LLM-based judgments provide comparable e...

There have been a number of investigations on whether LLMs can replace humans for relevance assessment. I think the evidence is showing LLMs have a strong role, but won't replace. This recent paper from @claclarke.bsky.social & Laura Dietz supports this view arxiv.org/abs/2412.17156

What a team of keynote speakers. I must confess seeing that Steve Robertson will be there is a thrill. One of the legends of information retrieval reflecting on the field. #sigir2025

sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/keynote-spea...

"Two Heads Are Better Than One: Improving Search Effectiveness Through LLM Generated Query Variants", short paper accepted #chiir2025. Led by our Masters student Kun Ran with Marwah Alaofi, myself, and @damianospina.com. Awesome result Kun! @admscentre.org.au @rmitcomputing.bsky.social

We invite PhD students to submit your work and join us at PhD Symposium @TheWebConf 2025, (www2025.thewebconf.org/phd-symposium). The submission due date is 18 Dec, 2024 (AOE)! We will see you in the beautiful and amazing Sydney down under! #WWW2025 #WebConf2025

Thanks to the #sigirap2024 people for giving us a mention on the conference bag, brought a smile to our faces.

So many aspects of evaluation including fully synthetic test collections, loved it.

I enjoyed attending the thought provoking two day gathering that helped drive the creation of this document. I look forward to reading it. "Future of Information Retrieval Research in the Age of Generative AI" arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02043

Speech recognition and machine translation research hugely influenced LLMs. It is worth remembering the pioneering research in information retrieval that for decades showed the value of taking a statistical approach to language problems.

Different formulations of tf*idf were tried, before the community settled on Robertson's incredibly robust BM25, presented at TREC in 1994 www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

The following year, Salton merged Karen's innovation with Luhn's, term frequency (tf) weights from 1957 to create the first tf*idf ranking function. ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/c...

Jelinek may have started in 72, but that was the year Karen Spärck Jones published her inverse document frequency (IDF) paper, which encompassed the radical idea that properties of words can be determined entirely from a corpus of documents. www.emerald.com/insight/cont...

In her talk, @katecrawford.bsky.social delved into the history of Large Language Models, she rightly highlighted the pioneering work of Fred Jelinek who kicked off language models in 1972, however, I wouldn't be faithful to my handle (IR Oldie) if I didn't highlight some IR history...

A bit of further information www.student.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2024...

Maarten de Rijke kan het niet alleen. Help jij mee? Epilepsie verstoort levens! Steun je mij met een donatie in mijn collectebus? Met de opbrengst kunnen we samen op zoek naar de oplossing van de verstorende aanvallen. Ik ben je eeuwig dankbaar!

Just in case you didn't see this shared elsewhere. Maarten writes "I am asking for donations because our daughter Emma passed away". epilepsie.digicollect.nl/maarten-de-r...