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Search Publications by: Ian Soboroff (Fed)

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Displaying 1 - 25 of 66

TREC 2015 Dynamic Domain Track Overview

October 1, 2024
Author(s)
Ian Soboroff, Hui Yang, John Frank
Search tasks for professional searchers, such as law enforcement agencies, police officers, and patent examiners, are often more complex than open domain Web search tasks. When professional searchers look for relevant information, it is often the case that

Report on The Search Futures Workshop at ECIR 2024

August 7, 2024
Author(s)
Leif Azzopardi, Charles Clarke, Paul Kantor, Bhaskar Mitra, Johanne Trippas, Zhaochun Ren, Ian Soboroff
The First Search Futures Workshop, in conjunction with the Fourty-sixth European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) 2024, looked into the future of search to ask questions such as: ˆ How can we harness the power of generative AI to enhance, improve

On the Evaluation of Machine-Generated Reports

July 14, 2024
Author(s)
James Mayfield, Eugene Yang, Dawn Lawrie, Sean MacAvaney, Paul McNamee, Douglas Oard, Luca Soldaini, Ian Soboroff, Orion Weller, Efsun Kayi, Kate Sanders, Marc Mason, Noah Hibbler
Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled new ways to satisfy information needs. Although great strides have been made in applying them to settings like document ranking and short-form text generation, they still struggle to compose complete, accurate, and

2024 NIST Generative AI (GenAI): Data Creation Specification for Text-to-Text (T2T) Generators

April 1, 2024
Author(s)
Yooyoung Lee, George Awad, Asad Butt, Lukas Diduch, Kay Peterson, Seungmin Seo, Ian Soboroff, Hariharan Iyer
Generator (G) teams will be tested on their system ability to generate content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content. For the pilot study, the evaluation will help determine strengths and weaknesses in their approaches including insights

2024 NIST Generative AI (GenAI): Evaluation Plan for Text-to-Text (T2T) Discriminators

April 1, 2024
Author(s)
Yooyoung Lee, George Awad, Asad Butt, Lukas Diduch, Kay Peterson, Seungmin Seo, Ian Soboroff, Hariharan Iyer
Generator (G) teams will be tested on their system's ability to generate content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content. For the pilot study, the evaluation will help determine strengths and weaknesses in their approaches including insights

Overview of the NTCIR-17 FairWeb-1 Task

February 13, 2024
Author(s)
Sijie Tao, Nuo Chen, Tetsuya Sakai, Zhumin Chu, Hiromi Arai, Ian Soboroff, Nicola Ferro, Maria Maistro
This paper provides an overview of the NTCIR-17 FairWeb-1 Task. FairWeb-1 is an English web search task which seeks more than an ad-hoc web search task. Our task considers not only document relevance but also group fairness. We designed three types of

The BETTER Cross-Language Information Retrieval Datasets

July 27, 2023
Author(s)
Ian Soboroff
The IARPA BETTER (Better Extraction from Text Through Enhanced Retrieval) program held three evaluations of information retrieval (IR) and information extraction (IE). For both tasks, the only training data available was in English, but systems had to

What Makes a Good Podcast Summary?

July 11, 2022
Author(s)
Rezvaneh Rezapour, Sravana Reddy, Rosie Jones, Ian Soboroff
Abstractive summarization of podcasts is motivated by the growing popularity of podcasts and the needs of their listeners. Podcasting is a markedly different domain from news and other media that are commonly studied in the context of automatic

Overview of TREC 2021

May 6, 2022
Author(s)
Ian Soboroff
TREC 2021 is the thirtieth edition of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). The main goal of TREC is to create the evaluation infrastructure required for large-scale testing of retrieval technology. This includes research on best methods for evaluation as

Can Old TREC Collections Reliably Evaluate Modern Neural Retrieval Models?

January 26, 2022
Author(s)
Ellen M. Voorhees, Ian Soboroff, Jimmy Lin
Neural retrieval models are generally regarded as fundamentally different from the retrieval techniques used in the late 1990's when the TREC ad hoc test collections were constructed. They thus provide the opportunity to empirically test the claim that poo

PSCR 2021: Social Media Incident Streams

October 1, 2021
Author(s)
Ian Soboroff
Monitoring social media for public safety is incredibly challenging. The TREC Social Media Incident Streams project collects social media during emergency events, annotates and labels it for public safety use, and provides a metrics-focused environment

PSCR 2021: Pecha Kucha Portfolio Overviews

September 28, 2021
Author(s)
John Beltz, Scott Ledgerwood, Roger Blalock, Joe Grasso, John S. Garofolo, Jesse Frey, Cara O'Malley, Fernando Cintron, Bill Fisher, Gema Howell, Yee-Yin Choong, Jack Lewis, Paul Merritt, Edmond J. Golden III, Ian Soboroff, Craig Connelly, Gary Howarth, Brianna Vendetti, Katelynn Kapalo, Margaret Pinson
PSCR Research Portfolio Leaders join their staff to provide an overview of the projects housed within their PSCR portfolio. Each portfolio overview is delivered in a traditional Pecha Kucha style presentation, dividing topics into 20 slides that when

Searching for Answers in a Pandemic: An Overview of TREC-COVID

September 1, 2021
Author(s)
Ellen M. Voorhees, Ian Soboroff, Kirk Roberts, Tasmeer Alam, Steven Bedrick, Dina Demner-Fushman, Kyle Lo, Lucy L. Wang, William Hersh
We present an overview of the TREC-COVID Challenge, an information retrieval (IR) shared task to evaluate search on scientific literature related to COVID-19. The goals of TREC-COVID include the construction of a pandemic search test collection and the

TREC Deep Learning Track: Reusable Test Collections in the Large Data Regime

July 11, 2021
Author(s)
Ellen M. Voorhees, Ian Soboroff, Nick Craswell, Bhaskar Mitra, Emine Yilmaz, Daniel Campos
The TREC Deep Learning (DL) Track studies ad hoc search in the large data regime, meaning that a large set of human-labeled training data is available. Results so far indicate that the best models with large data are likely deep neural networks. This paper

TREC 2020 News Track Overview

May 21, 2021
Author(s)
Ian Soboroff, Shudong Huang, Donna Harman
The News track focuses on information retrieval in the service of help- ing people read the news. In 2018, in cooperation with the Washington Post1, we released a new collection of nearly 600,000 news articles, and crafted two tasks related to how news is

TREC-COVID: Constructing a Pandemic Information Retrieval Test Collection

February 19, 2021
Author(s)
Ellen M. Voorhees, Ian Soboroff, Tasmeer Alam, William Hersh, Kirk Roberts, Dina Demner-Fushman, Kyle Lo, Lucy L. Wang, Steven Bedrick
TREC-COVID is a community evaluation designed to build a test collection that captures the information needs of biomedical researchers using the scientific literature during a pandemic. One of the key characteristics of pandemic search is the accelerated

PSCR 2020_Social Media Incident Streams

October 29, 2020
Author(s)
Ian M. Soboroff
The ubiquity of mobile internet-enabled devices combined with wide-spread social media use during emergencies is posing new challenges for response personnel. In particular, service operators are now expected to monitor these online channels to extract

International Workshop on Deep Video Understanding

October 21, 2020
Author(s)
Keith Curtis, George Awad, Shahzad K. Rajput, Ian Soboroff
This is the introduction paper to the International Workshop on Deep Video Understanding. In recent years, a growing trend towards working on understanding videos (in particular movies) in a more deeper level started to motivate researchers working in

TREC-COVID: Rationale and Structure of an Information Retrieval Shared Task for COVID-19

July 8, 2020
Author(s)
Ellen M. Voorhees, Ian Soboroff, Tasmeer Alam, Kirk Roberts, William Hersh, Dina Demner-Fushman, Steven Bedrick, Kyle Lo, Lucy L. Wang
TREC-COVID is an information retrieval (IR) shared task initiated to support clinicians and clinical research during the COVID-19 pandemic. IR for pandemics breaks many normal assumptions, which can be seen by examining nine important basic IR research

Overview of the NIST 2016 LoReHLT Evaluation

November 13, 2017
Author(s)
Audrey N. Tong, Lukasz L. Diduch, Jonathan G. Fiscus, Yasaman Haghpanah, Shudong Huang, David M. Joy, Kay Peterson, Ian M. Soboroff
Initiated in conjunction with DARPA's Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI) Program, the NIST LoReHLT (Low Re-source Human Language Technology) evaluation series seeks to incubate research on fundamental natural language processing tasks

Using Replicates in Information Retrieval Evaluation

August 2, 2017
Author(s)
Ellen M. Voorhees, Daniel V. Samarov, Ian M. Soboroff
This paper explores a method for more accurately estimating the main effect of the system in a typical test-collection-based evaluation of information retrieval systems, and thus increasing the sensitivity of system comparisons. Randomly partitioning the

Promoting Repeatability Through Open Runs

June 7, 2016
Author(s)
Ellen M. Voorhees, Shahzad K. Rajput, Ian M. Soboroff
TREC 2015 introduced the concept of ‘Open Runs’ in response to the increasing focus on repeatability of information retrieval experiments. An Open Run is a TREC submission backed by a software repository such that the software in the repository reproduces

Computing confidence intervals for common IR measures

December 9, 2014
Author(s)
Ian M. Soboroff
Confidence intervals quantify the uncertainty in an average and o↵er a robust alternative to hypothesis testing. We measure the performance of standard and bootstrapped con- fidence intervals on a number of common IR measures using several TREC and NTCIR