We just released "German Commons", the largest openly-licensed German text dataset for LLM training: 154B tokens with clear usage rights for research and commercial use. huggingface.co/datasets/coral-nlp/german-commons

We are proud to announce that we are now indexed by @dblp! Click below for Volume 1, Number 1, 2025 https://dblp.org/db/journals/irrj/irrj1.html

The organization of #ECIR2026 has started! We just had our first call with all track chairs. With the calls now finalized, online and distributed across mailing lists, we’re moving on to the rest of the conference preparation! @ecir2026.eu 📍 Delft, 30 Mar – 2 Apr 2026 👉 ecir2026.eu

Honored to win the ICTIR Best Paper Honorable Mention Award for "Axioms for Retrieval-Augmented Generation"! Our new axioms are integrated with ir_axioms: github.com/webis-de/ir_... Nice to see axiomatic IR gaining momentum.

Congrats to the authors @lgnp.bsky.social @timhagen.bsky.social @maik-froebe.bsky.social @matthias-hagen.bsky.social @benno-stein.de @martin-potthast.com @hscells.bsky.social from @unikassel.bsky.social @hessianai.bsky.social @scadsai.bsky.social @unituebingen.bsky.social @uni-jena.de & Uni Weimar

Happy to share that our paper "The Viability of Crowdsourcing for RAG Evaluation" received the Best Paper Honourable Mention at #SIGIR2025! Very grateful to the community for recognizing our work on improving RAG evaluation.  📄 webis.de/publications...

Want to know how to make bi-encoders more than 3x faster with a new backbone encoder model? Check out our talk on the Token-Independent Text Encoder (TITE) #SIGIR2025 in the efficiency track. It pools vectors within the model to improve efficiency dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Now @fschlatt.bsky.social presents "TITE: Token-Independent Text Encoder for Information Retrieval" at #SIGIR2025 Paper: webis.de/publications...

Lukas Gienapp presents "The Viability of Crowdsourcing for RAG Evaluation" at #SIGIR2025 The paper is available at: webis.de/publications...

Lucky to witness #IRRJ editor-in-chief @djoerd.idf.social.ap.brid.gy signing a copy of the first edition of @irrj.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy for Ian Soboroff, author of the paper “Don’t Use LLMs to Make Relevance Judgments” in the volume. #SIGIR2025 irrj.org/article/view...

@mrparryparry.bsky.social presenting our work on reproducing TREC DL 2019 judgements and the implications for evaluating modern ranking models on modern collections. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.20937

#sigir2025 excellent reviewers

Thank you Carlos for the shout-out of Lightning IR in the LSR tutorial at #SIGIR2025 If you want to fine your own LSR models, check out our framework at github.com/webis-de/lig...

From July 13-17, 2025, @scadsai.bsky.social will join the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in Padua, Italy. Our researchers have made the following contributions. Learn more about #SIGIR2025: 👉 https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/

Congratulations to the authors @lgnp.bsky.social @deckersniklas.bsky.social @martin-potthast.com @hscells.bsky.social ! 📄 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2407.21515 💻 Code: github.com/webis-de/ada...

Our paper on self-distillation for training bi-encoders got accepted at #ICTIR2025! By exploiting pretrained encoder capabilities, our approach eliminates expensive teacher models and batch sampling while maintaining the same effectiveness.

Die @unituebingen feiert Erfolg im Exzellencluster-Wettbewerb 🎉Freude und Jubel bei der Pressekonferenz zur Entscheidung der DFG am 22.05.25 mit gut 200 Gästen. Weitere Infos und Fotos gibt es online 👉 uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet... @cmfi.bsky.social @ml4science.bsky.social

Die #Exzellenzcluster stehen fest: Heute hat die Exzellenzkommission 70 Projekte zur Förderung ausgewählt. 45 Cluster werden fortgesetzt, 25 neu eingerichtet. Die Förderung beginnt ab 1. Jan. 2026 für 7 Jahre, die Fördersumme beträgt insg. 539 Mio. €/Jahr. Die Liste: www.dfg.de/resource/blo... 1/3

Join us for the QPP Workshop today starting at 9 AM in the Sagrestia, IMT Campus!

ESSIR 2025, the European Summer School on Information Retrieval in Wolverhampton, UK, July 7-11! Dive into cutting-edge Information Retrieval & AI, network with experts. Plus, don’t miss the interactive FDIA Symposium! 🎓 👉 2025.essir.eu #IR #AI #ECIR2025

Short Paper: Rank-DistiLLM: Closing the Effectiveness Gap Between Cross-Encoders and LLMs for Passage Re-ranking webis.de/publications... Full Paper: Set-Encoder: Permutation-Invariant Inter-Passage Attention for Listwise Passage Re-Ranking with Cross-Encoders webis.de/publications...

Now we have @fschlatt.bsky.social on the #ECIR2025 stage predenting the research on the Set-Encoder. The paper is online at: webis.de/publications...

Honored to receive the best short paper award and best paper honourable mention award at #ECIR2025. Thank you to all co-authors @maik-froebe.bsky.social, @hscells.bsky.social, Shengyao Zhuang, @bevankoopman.bsky.social, Guido Zuccon, Benno Stein, @martin-potthast.com, @matthias-hagen.bsky.social 🥳

I was very happy to talk about corpus subsampling at #ECIR2025 today. Please find the paper at webis.de/publications... And lat bur not least, here are some of my favorite impressions of the first day of ECIR :)

🧵 2/4 Key findings: 1️⃣ Humans write best? No! LLM responses are rated better than human. 2️⃣ Essay answers? No! Bullet lists are often preferred. 3️⃣ Evaluate with BLEU? No! Reference-based metrics don't align with human preferences. 4️⃣ LLMs as judges? No! Prompted models produce inconsistent labels.

📢 Our paper "The Viability of Crowdsourcing for RAG Evaluation" has been accepted to #SIGIR2025 ! We compared how good humans and LLMs are at writing and judging RAG responses, assembling 1800+ responses across 3 styles, and 47K+ pairwise judgments in 7 quality dimensions. 🧵➡️

📢 New Paper: "Recall, Robustness, and Lexicographic Evaluation" (ACM TORS) F Diaz, M Ekstrand (@md.ekstrandom.net), B Mitra (@bmitra.bsky.social) For IR, NLP, and ML researchers working on ranking systems evaluated for recall and robustness. 🧵 1/5 dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

A large contingent of our staff & students @uofgcompsci.bsky.social will soon be traveling to #ECIR2025. We'll be presenting our latest work in #search & #RecSys throughout the 5-day conference. Looking forward to connecting with colleagues and friends in Lucca!

Current status: #irrj followers on #bluesky: 37 🦋 #IRRJ followers on #fediverse: 91 🐘 We need people on #BlueSky that advertise us. Who can help? Reposts welcome to reach those people

🚨 New Pre-Print! 🚨 Reviewer 2 has once again asked for DL’19, what can you say in rebuttal?  To help, we have re-annotated DL’19. Work done with @maik_froebe.bsky.social, @hscells.bsky.social, @fschlatt1.bsky.social, Guglielmo Faggioli, Saber Zerhoudi, @macavaney.bsky.social, Eugene Yang 🧵

The fact that LLMs are almost as effective as humans for screening means @elicitorg systematic review/technical report method is likely to perform ok. But if LLMs are bad at generating boolean search strategy, how do they automate the search set? (1)

Interested in joining our research group or do you know someone who might be interested? We have a new vacancy: Research position at the Webis group on Watermarking for Large Language Models. More information: webis.de/for-students...

Presentation abstracts for the SIGIR Low Resource Track are due in a month. SIGIR is able to provide travel support for a limited number of researchers or practitioners from low-income and lower-middle income countries. sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/low-resource...

Some people told us that the #IR scene is flocking to bsky, but where are they? #irrj followers on #bluesky: 20 🙂 #IRRJ followers on #fediverse: 72 😎 Boosts/Repost welcome

This is just out, and looks very comprehensive: ACM Book "Information Retrieval: Advanced Topics and Techniques." Includes foundations of IR (neural search, #RecSys, etc.), Adaptations and concerns (conversational, privacy and bias), and IR for different verticals: dl.acm.org/doi/book/10....

📢 We are seeking #PhD students for a fully funded research project (open to local & international applicants) @sheffieldnlp.bsky.social . This project is supported by a cross-discipline supervision team and opportunities. www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

The #TREC2024 conference just started. Turns out that BM25 is turning 30 🥳 #TREC #TREC24

Time for a starter pack on information retrieval: go.bsky.app/MXPJoTn

Today we will present our poster on Query Variation Robustness of Transformer Models at #EMNLP2024. You can find us at the Information Retrieval and Text Mining 3 poster session at #EMNLP2024.