Report on the 2nd International Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval (NewsIR'18)

Abstract

The news industry has undergone a revolution in the past decade, with substantial changes continuing to this day. News consumption habits are changing due to the increase in the volume of news and the variety of sources. Readers need new mechanisms to cope with this vast volume of information in order to not only find a signal in the noise, but also to understand what is happening in the world given the multiple points of view describing events. These challenges in journalism relate to Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) fields such as: verification of a source's reliability; the integration of news with other sources of information; real-time processing of both news content and social streams; de-duplication of stories; and entity detection and disambiguation. Although IR and NLP have been applied to news for decades, the changing nature of the space requires fresh approaches and a closer collaboration with our colleagues from the journalism environment. Following the success of the previous version of the workshop (NewsIR'16), the goal of this workshop, held in conjunction with ECIR 2018, is to continue to stimulate such discussion between the communities and to share interesting approaches to solve real user problems. A total number of 19 submissions were received and reviewed, of which 12 were accepted for presentation. In addition to that, we had over 30 registered participants in the workshop who were pleased to attend the two keynote talks given by well-known experts in the field - Edgar Meij (from industry) and Peter Tolmie (from academia) and oral and poster presentations from the accepted papers. The workshop also included a breakout session to discuss ideas for a future data challenge in news IR and closed with a focused panel discussion to reflect on the day. In summary, several ideas were presented in the workshop on solving complex information needs in the news domain. In addition, the workshop concluded with suggestions of important challenges and shared tasks to work on as a community for News IR.