1. Report on the Lucene4IR Workshop
Charlie Hull - Managing Director
30th November 2015
Search Solutions
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2. @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

3. @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

4. 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?

5. 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

6. @FlaxSearch
References & outputs
Programme & slides
Github repository
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

7. 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
Flax runs Lucene Hackdays via 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

8. Thankyou! Any questions? charlie@flax.co.uk www.flax.co.uk/blog
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