Frontiers, Challenges, and Opportunities for Information Retrieval: Report from SWIRL 2012 the Second Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval in Lorne


James Allan
Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, MA.

W. Bruce Croft
Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, MA.

Alistair Moffat
Department of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.

Mark Sanderson
School of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University, Victoria 3001, Australia.


Status

SIGIR Forum, 46(1):2-32, 2012.

Abstract

During a three-day workshop in February 2012, 45 Information Retrieval researchers met to discuss long-range challenges and opportunities within the field. The result of the workshop is a diverse set of research directions, project ideas, and challenge areas. This report describes the workshop format, provides summaries of broad themes that emerged, includes brief descriptions of all the ideas, and provides detailed discussion of six proposals that were voted "most interesting" by the participants. Key themes include the need to: move beyond ranked lists of documents to support richer dialog and presentation, represent the context of search and searchers, provide richer support for information seeking, enable retrieval of a wide range of structured and unstructured content, and develop new evaluation methodologies.

Full text

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2215676.2215678