Report on the Lucene4IR Workshop Charlie Hull - Managing Director 30th November 2015 Search Solutions charlie@flax.co.uk www.flax.co.uk/blog +44 (0) 8700 118334 Twitter: @FlaxSearch

@FlaxSearch What was Lucene4IR? “to bring together researchers and developers to create a set of evaluation resources showing how to use Lucene to perform typical IR operations (i.e. indexing, retrieval, etc.) as well as how to extend, modify and work with Lucene to extract typical statistics, implement typical retrieval models, and to evaluate various TREC tasks.” Funded by the European Science Foundation / ELIAS Network (Grant No. SM 5916) & sponsored by

@FlaxSearch Who & where? Around 30 attendees from academia & industry (Flax, Lucidworks, Bloomberg...) Held on 8th and 9th of September 2016, at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow

Themes Lucene-based search engines widely used in industry @FlaxSearch Themes Lucene-based search engines widely used in industry But academics usually work with IR-specific tools (Terrier, Lemur, Indri...) Skills shortage in industry Developments in IR are slow to appear in Lucene How do we make it easier to teach Lucene skills?

Sessions Industry Lucene in Industry – Charlie Hull (Flax) @FlaxSearch Sessions Industry Lucene in Industry – Charlie Hull (Flax) Deep Dive into the Lucene Query/Weight/Scorer Java Classes - Jake Mannix (Lucidworks) Learning to Rank – Diego Ceccarelli (Bloomberg) Academia Introduction – Leif Azzopardi (University of Glasgow) Using Lucene for Teaching and Learning IR - Prof. Juan Manual Fernandez Luna (University of Granada) Evaluation and Reproducible Experiments - Sauparna "Rup" Palchowdhury (NIST) Hackathon & Breakouts

@FlaxSearch References & outputs Programme & slides https://sites.google.com/site/lucene4ir Github repository https://github.com/leifos/lucene4ir Simple overview of Lucene Test data sets Indexing, Retrieval & Stats applications using Lucene Also worked on customised indexer process, BM25L, query expansion with synonyms, alternative scoring methods... Paper submitted to ACM SIGIR Forum https://github.com/leifos/lucene4ir/tree/master/sigirforumreport

What next? Continue to build links between industry & academia @FlaxSearch What next? Continue to build links between industry & academia Note Lucidworks offers some reduced student pricing for http://lucenerevolution.org Flax runs Lucene Hackdays via http://www.meetup.com/Apache-Lucene-Solr-London-User-Group/ next is Jan 20th for FullFact Continue to develop the code built during the hackathon Integrate the applications in an IR course Contact Dr. Leif Azzopardi to get involved http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~leif/

Thankyou! Any questions? charlie@flax.co.uk www.flax.co.uk/blog +44 (0) 8700 118334 Twitter: @FlaxSearch