European Summer School in Information Retrieval

The European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR) is a scientific event founded in 1990, which starts off a series of Summer Schools to provide high quality teaching of information retrieval on advanced topics. ESSIR is typically a week-long event consisting of guest lectures and seminars from invited lecturers who are recognized experts in the field. The aim of ESSIR is to give to its participants a common ground in different aspects of Information Retrieval (IR). Maristella Agosti in 2008 stated that: “The term IR identifies the activities that a person – the user – has to conduct to choose, from a collection of documents, those that can be of interest to him to satisfy a specific and contingent information need.”

We can see that the meaning of the term IR has remained the same practically from its inception when in the 1966 Gerard Salton defined IR as follows: “The SMART retrieval system takes both documents and search requests in unrestricted English, performs a complete content analysis automatically, and retrieves those documents which most nearly match the given request.” In 1979, Keith Van Rijsbergen wrote: “In principle, information storage and retrieval is simple. Suppose there is a store of documents and a person (user of the store) formulates a question (request or query) to which the answer is a set of documents satisfying the information need expressed by his question.” Furthermore, in 2003, Ricardo Baeza-Yates formulated this definition of IR: “IR aims at modeling, designing, and implementing systems able to provide fast and effective content-based access to large amounts of information. The aim of an IR system is to estimate the relevance of information items to a user’s information need expressed in a query.”

IR is a discipline with many facets and at the same time influences and is influenced by many other scientific disciplines. Indeed, IR ranges from Computer Science to Information Science and beyond; moreover, a large number of IR methods and techniques are adopted and absorbed by several technologies. The IR core methods and techniques are those for designing and developing IR systems, Web search engines, and tools for information storing and querying in Digital Libraries. IR core subjects are: system architectures, algorithms, formal theoretical models, and evaluation of the diverse systems and services that implement functionalities of storing and retrieving documents from multimedia document collections, and over wide area networks such as the Internet.

Paraphrasing Keith Van Rijsbergen it is possible to say that in IR is fundamental “the interplay of theory, practice, and experiment”. ESSIR aims to give a deep and authoritative insight of the core IR methods and subjects along these three dimensions and also for this reason it is intended for researchers starting out in IR, for industrialists who wish to know more about this increasingly important topic and for people working on topics related to management of information on the Internet.

ESSIR Editions

ESSIR series started in 1990 coming out from the successful experience of the Summer School in Information Retrieval (SSIR) conceived and designed by Nick Belkin, Rutgers University, U.S.A., and Maristella Agosti, University of Padua, Italy, for an Italian audience in 1989.

External Links

• ESSIR presentation page of the IMS Research Group
• IMS Research Group
• Department of Information Engineering - University of Padua
• University of Padua