The journalism industry has undergone a revolution in the past decade, leading to new opportunities as well as challenges. News consumption, production and delivery have all been affected and transformed by technology Readers require new mechanisms to cope with the vast volume of information in order to be informed about news events. Reporters have begun to use natural language processing (NLP) and (IR) techniques for investigative work. Publishers and aggregators are seeking new business models, and new ways to reach and retain their audience. A shift in business models has led to a gradual shift in styles of journalism in attempts to increase page views; and, far more concerning, to real mis- and dis-information, alongside allegations of "fake news" threatening the journalistic freedom and integrity of legitimate news outlets. Social media platforms drive viewership, creating filter bubbles and an increasingly polarized readership. News documents have always been a part of research on information access and retrieval methods. Over the last few years, the IR community has increasingly recognized these challenges in journalism and opened a conversation about how we might begin to address them. Evidence of this recognition is the participation in the two previous editions of our NewsIR workshop, held in ECIR 2016 and 2018. One of the most important outcomes of those workshops is an increasing awareness in the community about the changing nature of journalism and the IR challenges it entails. To move yet another step forward, the goal of the third edition of our workshop will be to create a multidisciplinary venue that brings together news experts from both technology and journalism. This would take NewsIR from a European forum targeting mainly IR researchers, into a more inclusive and influential international forum. We hope that this new format will foster further understanding for both news professionals and IR researchers, as well as producing better outcomes for news consumers. We will address the possibilities and challenges that technology offers to the journalists, the challenges that new developments in journalism create for IR researchers, and the complexity of information access tasks for news readers.

Location-based social networks (LBSNs), such as Foursquare, fostered the emergence of new tasks such as recommending venues a user might wish to visit. In the literature, recommending venues has typically been addressed using user-centric recommendation approaches relying on collaborative filtering techniques. Such approaches not only require many users with detailed profiles to be effective, but they also cannot recommend venues to users who are not actually members of the LBSN. In contrast, in this paper, we introduce a venue-centric yet personalised probabilistic approach that suggests personalised and popular venues for users to visit in the near future. In our approach, we probabilistically incorporate two components, a popularity component for predicting the popularity of a venue at a given point in time, as estimated from the attendance of the venue in the LBSN (i.e. number of check-ins), and a personalisation component for identifying its interestingness with respect to the estimated preferences of the user. The popularity of each venue is predicted using time series forecasting models that are trained on the recent attendance trends of the venue, while the users' interests are modelled from the entity pages that they like on Facebook. Using three major cities, we conduct a user study to evaluate the effectiveness of the two components of our approach in suggesting venues for different types of users at different times of the day. Our experimental results show that an approach that combines the popularity and personalisation components is able to consistently outperform the recommendation service of the leading Foursquare LBSN. We also find that combining popularity and personalisation is effective for both new visitors and residents, while former visitors prefer popular venues.

In this paper, we study the emerging Information Retrieval (IR) task of local event retrieval using sensor metadata streams. Sensor metadata streams include information such as the crowd density from video processing, audio classifications, and social media activity. We propose to use these metadata streams to identify the topics of local events within a city, where each event topic corresponds to a set of terms representing a type of events such as a concert or a protest. We develop a supervised approach that is capable of mapping sensor metadata observations to an event topic. In addition to using a variety of sensor metadata observations about the current status of the environment as learning features, our approach incorporates additional background features to model cyclic event patterns. Through experimentation with data collected from two locations in a major Spanish city, we show that our approach markedly outperforms an alternative baseline. We also show that modelling background information improves event topic identification.

Information systems that utilise contextual information have the potential of helping a user identify relevant information more quickly and more accurately than systems that work the same for all users and contexts. Contextual information comes in a variety of types, often derived from records of past interactions between a user and the information system. It can be individual or group based. We are focusing on the latter, harnessing the search behaviour of cohorts of users, turning it into a domain model that can then be used to assist other users of the same cohort. More specifically, we aim to explore how such a domain model is best utilised for profile-biased summarisation of documents in a navigation scenario in which such summaries can be displayed as hover text as a user moves the mouse over a link. The main motivation is to help a user find relevant documents more quickly. Given the fact that the Web in general has been studied extensively already, we focus our attention on Web sites and similar document collections. Such collections can be notoriously difficult to search or explore. The process of acquiring the domain model is not a research interest here; we simply adopt a biologically inspired method that resembles the idea of ant colony optimisation. This has been shown to work well in a variety of application areas. The model can be built in a continuous learning cycle that exploits search patterns as recorded in typical query log files. Our research explores different summarisation techniques, some of which use the domain model and some that do not. We perform task-based evaluations of these different techniques—thus of the impact of the domain model and profile-biased summarisation—in the context of Web site navigation.

We present SmartVenues, a system that recommends nearby venues to a user who visits or lives in a city. SmartVenues models the variation over time of each venue's level of attendance, and uses state-of-the-art time series forecasting algorithms to predict the future attendance of these venues. We use the predicted levels of attendance to infer the popularity of a venue at future points in time, and to provide the user with recommendations at different times of the day. If the users log in with their Facebook account, the recommendations are personalised using the pages they "like". In this demonstrator, we detail the architecture of the system and the data that we collect in real-time to be able to perform the predictions. We also present two different interfaces that build upon our system to display the recommendations: a web-based application and a mobile application.

Suggesting venues to a user in a given geographic context is an emerging task that is currently attracting a lot of attention. Existing studies in the literature consist of approaches that rank candidate venues based on different features of the venues and the user, which either focus on modeling the preferences of the user or the quality of the venue. However, while providing insightful results and conclusions, none of these studies have explored the relative effectiveness of these different features. In this paper, we explore a variety of user-dependent and venue-dependent features and apply state-of-the-art learning to rank approaches to the problem of contextual suggestion in order to find what makes a venue relevant for a given context. Using the test collection of the TREC 2013 Contextual Suggestion track, we perform a number of experiments to evaluate our approach. Our results suggest that a learning to rank technique can significantly outperform a Language Modelling baseline that models the positive and negative preferences of the user. Moreover, despite the fact that the contextual suggestion task is a personalisation task (i.e. providing the user with personalised suggestions of venues), we surprisingly find that user-dependent features are less effective than venue-dependent features for estimating the relevance of a suggestion.

In this paper, we approach the problem of real-time filtering in the Twitter Microblogging platform. We adapt an effective traditional news filtering technique, which uses a text classifier inspired by Rocchio's relevance feedback algorithm, to build and dynamically update a profile of the user's interests in real-time. In our adaptation, we tackle two challenges that are particularly prevalent in Twitter: sparsity and drift. In particular, sparsity stems from the brevity of tweets, while drift occurs as events related to the topic develop or the interests of the user change. First, to tackle the acute sparsity problem, we apply query expansion to derive terms or related tweets for a richer initialisation of the user interests within the profile. Second, to deal with drift, we modify the user profile to balance between the importance of the short-term interests, i.e. emerging subtopics, and the long-term interests in the overall topic. Moreover, we investigate an event detection method from Twitter and newswire streams to predict times at which drift may happen. Through experiments using the TREC Microblog track 2012, we show that our approach is effective for a number of common filtering metrics such as the user's utility, and that it compares favourably with state-of-the-art news filtering baselines. Our results also uncover the impact of different factors on handling topic drifting.

Modern search engines have been moving away from simplistic interfaces that aimed at satisfying a user's need with a single‐shot query. Interactive features are now integral parts of web search engines. However, generating good query modification suggestions remains a challenging issue. Query log analysis is one of the major strands of work in this direction. Although much research has been performed on query logs collected on the web as a whole, query log analysis to enhance search on smaller and more focused collections has attracted less attention, despite its increasing practical importance. In this article, we report on a systematic study of different query modification methods applied to a substantial query log collected on a local website that already uses an interactive search engine. We conducted experiments in which we asked users to assess the relevance of potential query modification suggestions that have been constructed using a range of log analysis methods and different baseline approaches. The experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of log analysis to extract query modification suggestions. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that a more fine‐grained approach than grouping search requests into sessions allows for extraction of better refinement terms from query log files.

A concept hierarchy created from a document collection can be used for query recommendation on Intranets by ranking terms according to the strength of their links to the query within the hierarchy. A major limitation is that this model produces the same recommendations for identical queries and rebuilding it from scratch periodically can be extremely inefficient due to the high computational costs. We propose to adapt the model by incorporating query refinements from search logs. Our intuition is that the concept hierarchy built from the collection and the search logs provide complementary conceptual views on the same search domain, and their integration should continually improve the effectiveness of recommended terms. Two adaptation approaches using query logs with and without click information are compared. We evaluate the concept hierarchy models (static and adapted versions) built from the Intranet collections of two academic institutions and compare them with a state-of-the-art log-based query recommender, the Query Flow Graph, built from the same logs. Our adaptive model significantly outperforms its static version and the query flow graph when tested over a period of time on data (documents and search logs) from two institutions' Intranets.