Abstract This paper introduces the Collection on ECIR 2023. The 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023) was held in Dublin, Ireland, during April 2–6, 2023. The conference was the largest ECIR ever, and brought together hundreds of researchers from Europe and abroad. A selection of papers shortlisted for the best paper awards was asked to submit expanded versions appearing in this Discover Computing (formerly the Information Retrieval Journal) Collection on ECIR 2023. First, an analytic paper on incorporating first stage retrieval status values as input in neural cross-encoder re-rankers. Second, new models and new data for a new task of temporal natural language inference. Third, a weak supervision approach to video retrieval overcoming the need for large-scale human labeled training data. Together, these papers showcase the breadth and diversity of current research on information retrieval.

LongEval-Retrieval is a Web document retrieval benchmark that focuses on continuous retrieval evaluation. This test collection is intended to be used to study the temporal persistence of Information Retrieval systems and will be used as the test collection in the Longitudinal Evaluation of Model Performance Track (LongEval) at CLEF 2023. This benchmark simulates an evolving information system environment - such as the one a Web search engine operates in - where the document collection, the query distribution, and relevance all move continuously, while following the Cranfield paradigm for offline evaluation. To do that, we introduce the concept of a dynamic test collection that is composed of successive sub-collections each representing the state of an information system at a given time step. In LongEval-Retrieval, each sub-collection contains a set of queries, documents, and soft relevance assessments built from click models. The data comes from Qwant, a privacy-preserving Web search engine that primarily focuses on the French market. LongEval-Retrieval also provides a 'mirror' collection: it is initially constructed in the French language to benefit from the majority of Qwant's traffic, before being translated to English. This paper presents the creation process of LongEval-Retrieval and provides baseline runs and analysis.

This paper introduces a novel visualization tool that facilitates the exploratory analysis of continuous evaluation for information retrieval systems. We base our analysis on score standardization and meta-analysis techniques applied to Information Retrieval evaluation. We present three functionalities: evaluation overview, delta evaluation, and meta-analysis applied to three perspectives: evaluation rounds, queries, and systems. To illustrate the use of the tool, we provide an example using the TREC-COVID test collection.

The identification of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) relies on laborious and expensive polysomnography (PSG) exams. However, it is known that other factors, easier to measure, can be good indicators of OSA and its severity. In this work, we extensively investigate the use of Machine Learning techniques in the task of determining which factors are more revealing with respect to OSA along with a discussion of the challenges to perform such a task. We ran extensive experiments over 1,042 patients from the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire of the city of Grenoble, France. The data included ordinary clinical information, and PSG results as baseline. We employed data preparation techniques including cleaning of outliers, imputation of missing values, and synthetic data generation. Following, we performed an exhaustive attribute selection scheme to find the most representative features. We found that the prediction of OSA depends largely on variables related to age, body mass, and sleep habits more than the ones related to alcoholism, tabagism, and depression. Next, we tested 60 regression/classification algorithms to predict the Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI), and the AHI-based severity of OSA. We achieved performances significantly superior to the state of the art both for AHI regression and classification. Our results can benefit the development of tools for the automatic screening of patients who should go through polysomnography and further treatments of OSA -- currently, our work in under consideration for production by the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire of Grenoble. Our thorough methodology enables experimental reproducibility on similar OSA-detection problems, and more generally, on other problems with similar data models.

No abstract available.

We propose a method that integrates relevance and understandability to rank health web documents. We use a learning to rank approach with standard retrieval features to determine topical relevance and additional features based on readability measures and medical lexical aspects to determine understandability. Our experiments measured the effectiveness of the learning to rank approach integrating understandability on a consumer health benchmark. The findings suggest that this approach promotes documents that are at the same time topically relevant and understandable.

Medical information is accessible from diverse sources including the general web, social media, journal articles, and hospital records; information searchers can be patients and their families, researchers, practitioners and clinicians. Challenges in medical information retrieval include: diversity of users and user knowledge and expertise; variations in the format, reliability, and quality of biomedical and medical information; the multi-modal nature of much of the data; and the need for accuracy and reliability of medical information. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in medical information search with the goal of identifying specific challenges that need to be addressed to advance the state-of-the-art.

We present a post-hoc analysis of a benchmarking activity for information retrieval (IR) in the medical domain to determine if performance for queries with different levels of complexity can be associated with different IR methods or techniques. Our analysis is based on data and runs for Task 3 of the CLEF 2013 eHealth lab, which provided patient queries and a large medical document collection for patient centred medical information retrieval technique development. We categorise the queries based on their complexity, which is defined as the number of medical concepts they contain. We then show how query complexity affects performance of runs submitted to the lab, and provide suggestions for improving retrieval quality for this complex retrieval task and similar IR evaluation tasks.