Ingo Frommholz

Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Haiming Liu, Ingo Frommholz

Textual descriptions for multimodal inputs entail recurrent refinement of queries to produce relevant output images. Despite efforts to address challenges such as scaling model size and data volume, the cost associated with pre-training and fine-tuning remains substantial. However, pre-trained large multimodal models (LMMs) encounter a modality gap, characterised by a misalignment between textual and visual representations within a common embedding space. Although fine-tuning can potentially mitigate this gap, it is typically expensive and impractical due to the requirement for extensive domain-driven data. To overcome this challenge, we propose a lightweight training-free approach utilising Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to extend across the modality using a linear mapping, which can be computed efficiently. During inference, this mapping is applied to images embedded by an LMM enabling retrieval of closest textual descriptions from the training set. These textual descriptions, in conjunction with an instruction, cater as an input prompt for the language model to generate new textual descriptions. In addition, we introduce an iterative technique for distilling the mapping by generating synthetic descriptions via the language model facilitating optimisation for standard utilised image description measures. Experimental results on two benchmark multimodal datasets demonstrate significant improvements.

Junaid Muzaffar, Khubaib Ahmed, Ingo Frommholz et al.

Training reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires significant computational resources and prolonged training durations. To address this challenge, we build upon prior work that introduced a neural architecture with permutation-invariant sensory processing. We propose a modified attention mechanism that applies a non-linear transformation to the key vectors (K), producing enriched representations (K') through a custom mapping function. This Nonlinear Attention (NLA) mechanism enhances the representational capacity of the attention layer, enabling the agent to learn more expressive feature interactions. As a result, our model achieves significantly faster convergence and improved training efficiency, while maintaining performance on par with the baseline. These results highlight the potential of nonlinear attention mechanisms to accelerate reinforcement learning without sacrificing effectiveness.

Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Haiming Liu, Ingo Frommholz

Understanding an information forager's actions during interaction is very important for the study of interactive information retrieval. Although information spread in uncertain information space is substantially complex due to the high entanglement of users interacting with information objects~(text, image, etc.). However, an information forager, in general, accompanies a piece of information (information diet) while searching (or foraging) alternative contents, typically subject to decisive uncertainty. Such types of uncertainty are analogous to measurements in quantum mechanics which follow the uncertainty principle. In this paper, we discuss information seeking as a reinforcement learning task. We then present a reinforcement learning-based framework to model forager exploration that treats the information forager as an agent to guide their behaviour. Also, our framework incorporates the inherent uncertainty of the foragers' action using the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics.

Sérgio Nunes, Suzanne Little, Sumit Bhatia et al.

ECIR 2020 https://ecir2020.org/ was one of the many conferences affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Conference Chairs decided to keep the initially planned dates (April 14-17, 2020) and move to a fully online event. In this report, we describe the experience of organizing the ECIR 2020 Workshops in this scenario from two perspectives: the workshop organizers and the workshop participants. We provide a report on the organizational aspect of these events and the consequences for participants. Covering the scientific dimension of each workshop is outside the scope of this article.

Guillaume Cabanac, Ingo Frommholz, Philipp Mayr

The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval workshop series (BIR) was launched at ECIR in 2014 \cite{MayrEtAl2014} and it was held at ECIR each year since then. This year we organize the 10th iteration of BIR. The workshop series at ECIR and JCDL/SIGIR tackles issues related to academic search, at the crossroads between Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Bibliometrics. In this overview paper, we summarize the past workshops, present the workshop topics for 2020 and reflect on some future steps for this workshop series.

Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Haiming Liu, Ingo Frommholz

User implicit feedback plays an important role in recommender systems. However, finding implicit features is a tedious task. This paper aims to identify users' preferences through implicit behavioural signals for image recommendation based on the Information Scent Model of Information Foraging Theory. In the first part, we hypothesise that the users' perception is improved with visual cues in the images as behavioural signals that provide users' information scent during information seeking. We designed a content-based image recommendation system to explore which image attributes (i.e., visual cues or bookmarks) help users find their desired image. We found that users prefer recommendations predicated by visual cues and therefore consider the visual cues as good information scent for their information seeking. In the second part, we investigated if visual cues in the images together with the images itself can be better perceived by the users than each of them on its own. We evaluated the information scent artifacts in image recommendation on the Pinterest image collection and the WikiArt dataset. We find our proposed image recommendation system supports the implicit signals through Information Foraging explanation of the information scent model.

Guillaume Cabanac, Ingo Frommholz, Philipp Mayr

The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval workshop series (BIR) at ECIR tackled issues related to academic search, at the crossroads between Information Retrieval and Bibliometrics. BIR is a hot topic investigated by both academia (e.g., ArnetMiner, CiteSeerx, DocEar) and the industry (e.g., Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Semantic Scholar). This report presents the 8th iteration of the one-day BIR workshop held at ECIR 2019 in Cologne, Germany.

Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Haiming Liu, Ingo Frommholz

A major challenge of recommender systems is to help users locating interesting items. Personalized recommender systems have become very popular as they attempt to predetermine the needs of users and provide them with recommendations to personalize their navigation. However, few studies have addressed the question of what drives the users' attention to specific content within the collection and what influences the selection of interesting items. To this end, we employ the lens of Information Foraging Theory (IFT) to image recommendation to demonstrate how the user could utilize visual bookmarks to locate interesting images. We investigate a personalized content-based image recommendation system to understand what affects user attention by reinforcing visual attention cues based on IFT. We further find that visual bookmarks (cues) lead to a stronger scent of the recommended image collection. Our evaluation is based on the Pinterest image collection.

Philipp Mayr, Ingo Frommholz, Guillaume Cabanac

The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) workshop series has started at ECIR in 2014 and serves as the annual gathering of IR researchers who address various information-related tasks on scientific corpora and bibliometrics. We welcome contributions elaborating on dedicated IR systems, as well as studies revealing original characteristics on how scientific knowledge is created, communicated, and used. This report presents all accepted papers at the 7th BIR workshop at ECIR 2018 in Grenoble, France.

Philipp Mayr, Ingo Frommholz, Guillaume Cabanac

Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) workshops serve as the annual gathering of IR researchers who address various information-related tasks on scientific corpora and bibliometrics. The workshop features original approaches to search, browse, and discover value-added knowledge from scientific documents and related information networks (e.g., terms, authors, institutions, references). We welcome contributions elaborating on dedicated IR systems, as well as studies revealing original characteristics on how scientific knowledge is created, communicated, and used. In this paper we introduce the BIR workshop series and discuss some selected papers presented at previous BIR workshops.

Philipp Mayr, Ingo Frommholz, Guillaume Cabanac

The BIR workshop brings together experts in Bibliometrics and Information Retrieval. While sometimes perceived as rather loosely related, these research areas share various interests and face similar challenges. Our motivation as organizers of the BIR workshop stemmed from a twofold observation. First, both communities only partly overlap, albeit sharing various interests. Second, it will be profitable for both sides to tackle some of the emerging problems that scholars face today when they have to identify relevant and high quality literature in the fast growing number of electronic publications available worldwide. Bibliometric techniques are not yet used widely to enhance retrieval processes in digital libraries, although they offer value-added effects for users. Information professionals working in libraries and archives, however, are increasingly confronted with applying bibliometric techniques in their services. The first BIR workshop in 2014 set the research agenda by introducing each group to the other, illustrating state-of-the-art methods, reporting on current research problems, and brainstorming about common interests. The second workshop in 2015 further elaborated these themes. This third BIR workshop aims to foster a common ground for the incorporation of bibliometric-enhanced services into scholarly search engine interfaces. In particular we will address specific communities, as well as studies on large, cross-domain collections like Mendeley and ResearchGate. This third BIR workshop addresses explicitly both scholarly and industrial researchers.

Philipp Mayr, Ingo Frommholz, Andrea Scharnhorst et al.

This workshop brings together experts of communities which often have been perceived as different once: bibliometrics / scientometrics / informetrics on the one side and information retrieval on the other. Our motivation as organizers of the workshop started from the observation that main discourses in both fields are different, that communities are only partly overlapping and from the belief that a knowledge transfer would be profitable for both sides. Bibliometric techniques are not yet widely used to enhance retrieval processes in digital libraries, although they offer value-added effects for users. On the other side, more and more information professionals, working in libraries and archives are confronted with applying bibliometric techniques in their services. This way knowledge exchange becomes more urgent. The first workshop set the research agenda, by introducing in each other methods, reporting about current research problems and brainstorming about common interests. This follow-up workshop continues the overall communication, but also puts one problem into the focus. In particular, we will explore how statistical modelling of scholarship can improve retrieval services for specific communities, as well as for large, cross-domain collections like Mendeley or ResearchGate. This second BIR workshop continues to raise awareness of the missing link between Information Retrieval (IR) and bibliometrics and contributes to create a common ground for the incorporation of bibliometric-enhanced services into retrieval at the scholarly search engine interface.