Information Retrieval and Theory Workshop

The purpose of this workshop is to promote discussion and interaction on the theoretical foundations of information retrieval. Various prominent members of the information retrieval (IR) community have been invited to share and discuss their ideas about theory and information retrieval.

The workshop is intended to serve as a forum for disseminating research and experience about the use of theory in IR, but also to make the point on the current status of information retrieval research and possible future directions.

This workshop is part of the Information Retrieval Festival, which is a week full of IR activities in Glasgow. It is hosted and sponsored by the University of Glasgow and is part of the Department of Computing Science's Research Festival.

The workshop is meant to be a discussion forum for people actively involved in theoretical information retrieval research and therefore its participation is by invitation only. The number of participants is strictly limited.

If you have not been invited and wish to participate please apply to Dr. Iadh Ounis (ounis@dcs.gla.ac.uk). In your e-mail, please state your research interests and reasons for wishing to participate. Participation is now closed. We do not have any more places left.

Registration to the workshop is free for all invitees. In order to register, please refer to the Festival's Registration Web page. Glasgow is a busy city in the summer. We provide guidelines regarding travel and accommodation in the Information Retrieval Festival main Web page.

The workshop will be held in the central Western Infirmary Lecture Theatre, which is at a walking distance from the Department of Computing Science main building.

The Western Informary Lecture Theatre is building B9 on maps of the campus. It is most easily accessed via University Place, off Byres Road just south of University Avenue.

More details on how to reach Glasgow is available here.

We will provide delegates with a high-speed Internet wireless access in the conference venue. Moreover, there will be a dedicated Internet room in the Boyd Orr building (building D1 on the campus map).

Theo Huibers (huibers@cs.utwente.nl)
KPMG/University of Twente (The Netherlands)

Iadh Ounis (ounis@dcs.gla.ac.uk)
University of Glasgow (UK)

Keith van Rijsbergen (keith@dcs.gla.ac.uk)
University of Glasgow (UK)

• Alan Smeaton, Dublin City University, Ireland
• Alessandro Agostini, University of Trento, Italy
• Arjen De Vries, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, The Netherlands
• Bruce Croft, University of Massachusetts, USA
• David Harper, Robert Gordon University, UK
• David Hawking, CSIRO, Australia
• David Losada, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain
• Djoerd Hiemstra, University of Twente, The Netherlands
• Gary Marchionini, University of North Carolina, USA
• Gianni Amati, Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, Italy
• Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow, UK
• Jian-Yun Nie, University of Montreal, Canada
• Kalervo Järvelin, University of Tampere, Finland
• Keith van Rijsbergen, University of Glasgow, UK
• Mark Girolami, University of Glasgow, UK
• Martin Porter, Tartarus, UK
• Mounia Lalmas, Queen Mary University of London, UK
• Peter Bruza, Distributed Systems Technology Centre, Australia, Australia
• Pia Borlund, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark
• Ricardo Baeza-Yates, University of Chile, Chile
• Sandor Dominich, University of Veszprem, Hungary
• Stefan Rueger, Imperial College of London, UK
• Stephen Robertson, Microsoft, UK
• Susan Dumais, Microsoft, USA
• Theo Huibers, KPMG/University of Twente, The Netherlands
• Thomas Rölleke, Queen Mary University of London, UK
• Wray Bunting, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland
• Yves Chiaramella, Université Joseph Fourier/IMAG, France

There will be various short talks. Each talk has a duration of 30 minutes: 20 minutes of talk and 10 minutes of discussion.

Each speaker will have two or more discussants, whose role is to facilitate and guide the discussion. The idea is to have lively discussions, where the discussants would challenge the speaker and involve the audience. A rough schedule of the program is given below.

Monday, 25th July:
8:45 - 09:00	Welcome
09:00 - 10:30	Session 1 "Language Models for IR - What Next?", by Prof. Bruce Croft Discussants: Bruza, van Rijsbergen "Theory and IR: A Probabilistic View", by Dr. Gianni Amati Discussants: Rölleke, De Vries "Expressing Language Modelling Approaches as Region Queries", by Dr. Djoerd Hiemstra Discussants: Lalmas, Ounis
10:30 - 11:00	Coffee/Tea break
11:00 - 12:30	Session 2 "Implementing Logical IR with Language Models", by Prof. Jian-Yun Nie Discussants: Croft, van Rijsbergen "Language Modelling for Sentence Retrieval", By Dr. David Losada Discussants: Amati, Hiemstra "On Occurrence and Informativeness Probabilities", by Dr. Thomas Rölleke Discussants: Bruza, Rueger
12:30 - 14:00	Lunch break
14:00 - 15:30	Session 3 "Quantum Logic of Semantic Space: An Exploratory Investigation into Context Effects", by Prof. Peter Bruza Discussants: Lalmas, Rölleke "What is Relevance?", by Prof. Theo Huibers Discussants: Losada, Ounis "A Measure Theoretic Approach to IR", by Prof. Sandor Dominich Discussants: Jävelin, Baeza-Yates
15:30 - 16:00	Coffee/Tea break
16:00 -17:30	Session 4 "Searching the Future", by Prof. Ricardo Baeza-Yates Discussants: Croft, Nie "IR Models in Multimedia and Other Applications", by Dr. Arjen de Vries Discussants: Rueger, Huibers "Frameworks, Models and Theories in IR - What Are They About?", by Prof. Kalervo Järvelin Discussants: Lalmas, Bruza
17:30 -17:35	Closing Remarks
19:00	Reception
End of Workshop