Autumn School 2018 for Information Retrieval and Information Foraging

Motivation

The Autumn School for Information Retrieval and Information Foraging (ASIRF) focuses on recent developments in information retrieval and information seeking behaviour and their applications. Information Retrieval deals with searching in unstructured data where the content cannot be fully mapped to a semantic-rich representation. In many professional fields of work and in everyday life, access to text data via search engines is today one of the most important forms of access to knowledge. Information Foraging aims to model the entire process from the awareness of an information problem through selecting appropriate information sources to the actual search. ASIRF provides a holistic perspective of the two fields and shows how Information Retrieval and Information Foraging interact. In addition to conceptual and methodological knowledge from both fields, ASIRF will also consider the application of methods from information retrieval and information behaviour in the important application areas digital humanities and social networks; ASIRF is therefore highly interdisciplinary in nature.

ASIRF provides nine tutorials, from foundations of Information Retrieval and Information Foraging over recent research topics such as collaborative IR, searching and mining argumentation structure to the application of these methods in Digital Humanities and Social Networks (including fake news detection). The lectures are complemented by case studies where students can apply their newly acquired knowledge to real research problems. Students and lecturers will live together for a week at Schloss Dagstuhl, which guarantees for a highly communicative and interactive atmosphere of the school. The intended audience of ASIRF are doctoral students and young researchers working in Information Retrieval, Information Foraging or using concepts or methods from these fields in their own research in other fields of research.