Two papers accepted at SIGIR'26 in Melbourne! Both tackle the same question: how do we scale IR evaluation reliably without compromising on human judgment as the gold standard? Spoiler: LLMs-as-a-judge does not work. 🧵1/5

#ECIR2027 is going to Southampton Football Club, England, UK in 2027! We encourage you to join us at www.ecir2027.co.uk and follow this page for updates. #IR #InformationRetrieval

At our SCOLIA workshop at #ECIR2026 we introduced shared tasks. UP2DATE@SCOLIA focusses on the development of new methods to assist in updating systematic reviews. Interested? Check out https://up2date.health-nlp.com! @hscells @potthast @carsten @ecir2026.eu

Jan Heinrich Merker presents work - with Harrison Scells @hscells.bsky.social and Martin Potthast @martin-potthast.com - on better support infra for mining the Archive Query Log. See also: https://github.com/webis-de/archive-query-log (Followup on the earlier SIGIR paper.) #ecir2026

Hello #ecir2026, the proceedings of our SCOLIA workshop on Thursday are online – https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4187/. Looking forward to (hopefully) seeing you. Happy reading!

Hello #ECIR2026, the proceedings of our SCOLIA workshop on Thursday are online – ceur-ws.org/Vol-4187/. Looking forward to (hopefully) seeing you. Happy reading!

🏆 Congratulations to our #ECIR2026 Reviewer Award & SPC Member Award recipients! Your commitment to high-quality peer review keeps our community thriving. Thank you! 🙏

I've already collected my first two stickers for the @ecir2026.eu Collab-a-thon. If you're in Delft today, don't muss out the first collab-a-thon session at 4pm in LAB.115 🤝 #collab-a-thon #collaboration #research #ecir

Going to @ecir2026.eu in Delft? Or need another reason to go there? Please drop by SCOLIA 2026, our Second International Workshop on Scholarly Information Access to enjoy some exciting presentations! Our programme is online now at https://sites.google.com/view/bir-ws/scolia-2026. See you in Delft!

We're hiring a Scientific Director for our AI Methods & Software Hub in Tübingen! This is a unique opportunity to build and lead a central hub at the intersection of cutting-edge ML research and scientific applications. Deadline: 30 April 2026. More info: uni-tuebingen.de/en/128980#c2...

#ecir2026 opening by Avishek Anand with photos of Delft when it is not rainy

One of my fav bars in Delft is https://www.locuspublicus.nl/ #ecir2026 #beer

Quite impressive! The Radboud University Information Retrieval group's contributions to #ECIR2026: nice poster made by @harrieo.bsky.social

Tomorrow, ECIR 2026 kicks off in Delft! 🎉 Day 1: tutorials & workshops at TU Delft's Aula, ending with a welcome reception. With over registered 450 attendees it's going to be a great few days. Don't forget: clocks spring forward tonight! ☀️🕐 We're bagged and ready 🎒 #ECIR2026 #IR #NLP #RecSys

We’re launching a new AI Methods & Software Hub in the ML cluster and are looking for a Director to build and lead it! Shape how ML/AI and software drive scientific discovery—in close collaboration with AI and domain scientists—within an extremely vibrant and collaborative ecosystem!

The presentations for the #irrj session at the at the 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval #ecir2026 are now in the conference schedule at: https://ecir2026.eu/programme/program-schedule/program/detail/38/irrj-papers-presentations

Become part of the DAAD & Humboldt Community 👋– a social network for fellows, alumni, and partners! Find out more and join now: daad-humboldt-community.de @daadworldwide.bsky.social

I am happy to share that I defended my PhD thesis this week. I want to thank all the people I collaborated with and met at conferences and workshops over the years! Especially a big thank you to my PhD supervisor, Matthias Hagen, and to Laura Dietz and Udo Kruschwitz for reviewing my thesis.

Going to @ecir2026.eu in Delft? Or need another reason to go there? Please drop by SCOLIA 2026, our Second International Workshop on Scholarly Information Access to enjoy some exciting presentations! Our programme is online now at sites.google.com/view/bir-ws/.... See you in Delft!

CFP – ECIR 2026 Join us at the 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2026) 📍 29 March – 2 April 2026 📍 Delft, The Netherlands 🔎 Full program: ecir2026.eu/programme/pr... 📝 Register now: ecir2026.dryfta.com/registration... We look forward to welcoming you to Delft at ECIR 2026!

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 🧵