COMMUNITY REPORT

Women in IR
Laura Dietz
University of New Hampshire
Laura.Dietz@unh.edu

Elinor Brondwine
Technion
elinor@tx.technion.ac.il

Shiri Dori-Hacohen
CIIR
University of Massachusetts
shiri@cs.umass.edu

Ellen Voorhees
NIST
Ellen.Voorhees@nist.gov

Abstract
Summarizing a year of activity of Women in IR, an initiative that aims to support andpromote female researchers in information retrieval.

Our Mission
Women in IR facilitates networking and mentoring opportunities within the community,
enabling a platform for efficient communication within the community. Our mission is toattract women to the field of IR research and ensure they stick around. We analyze genderreflecting data science oddities to scout for enactable solutions.

Female Role Models
Information retrieval has had strong women in the field from its start. Information Retrieval
has also had a strong focus on evaluation since its start, and women have been a big part ofthat emphasis. The most obvious woman in the field was Karen Spärck Jones. She had verybroad contributions to the field, including evaluation: she edited and wrote several chaptersfor “Information Retrieval Experiment” published in 1981, she and van Rijsbergen authoredthe original work on pooling that allowed larger test collections to be built, she was a very
active member of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) program committee and wrote
several overviews of TREC including a piece for the TREC book. Jean Tague-Sutcliffe wrote
on IR evaluation, including a chapter in the Information Retrieval Experiment book and anarticle in the Information Processing and Management (IPM) special issue on evaluation.
Donna Harman edited that special issue of IPM and started TREC. Ellen Voorhees has beenrunning TREC since 1996, and Harman and Voorhees co-edited and wrote chapters for theTREC book. Sue Dumais is another woman with broad contributions to the field, including
a strong interest in evaluation (both Spärk Jones and Dumais are Salton award winners aswell as Athena award winners). Carol Peters was the main force behind the Conference andACM SIGIR Forum

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Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). Mounia Lalmas was a co-organizer of Initiative for
the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX) and is now director of research at Yahoo! Yoelle
Maarek, vice president at Yahoo and the head of Yahoo Research, was elected Fellow of theACM for nurturing industry connections of the field. Noriko Kando is the force behind NII
Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). Diane Kelly, Professor
at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and known for her work on search behavior
and interactive IR, took office as the Chair of the ACM SIGIR Executive Committee. Thisis not a complete list of women in the field by any means, but does show that there havebeen highly visible women throughout IR’s history.

Women in IR Meeting at the 39th ACM SIGIR
The 39th ACM SIGIR conference in Pisa, Italy, hosted the 4th meeting of Women in IR, an
initiative that aims to further career chances and promote visibility of women in information
retrieval. Prof. Laura Dietz from the University of New Hampshire and Ph.D. Candidate
Shiri Dori-Hacohen from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the co-founders of womenin IR, conducted the meeting that hosted over 70 researchers, including a portion (over 15%)of male supporters.
At the meeting, several women presented their research. We are proud of the diversityof topics in the group covering all IR topics. These talks were delivered by the following
researchers. Myungha Jang from the University of Massachusetts on controversy detection
on the web to automatically warn users when visiting a web page discussing controversial
topics; Shiri Dori-Hacohen also from the University of Massachusetts on controversy detection in Wikipedia using collective classification; Ida Mele from the Universita della Svizzera
Italiana (USI) on asynchronous and heterogeneous topic mining; Manisha Verma from University College London presented on understanding and characterizing user search effort;
Elinor Brondwine from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology on utilizing focused relevant feedback to improve retrieval effectiveness; Ekaterina Shabunina from the University ofMilano-Bicocca on the issue of information propagation in social media; Sole Pera and Nevena
Dragovic from the Boise State University on enhancing IR applications for non-traditional
users, and improving recommender systems; Anastasia Giachanou from the Universit dellaSvizzera italiana (USI) on sentiment tracking over time for monitoring a brand sentiment;
Hadas Raviv from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology discussed entity based retrieval; Laura Dietz from the University of New Hampshire on knowledge consolidation andorganization for query-specific Wikipedia construction, with the goal of composing an entire
encyclopedia article.
A discussion on the needs of the Women in IR community revealed that any kind of
support regarding the difficulty of the day-to-day life of researchers is highly appreciated.
Ranging from “How can I make it through this Ph.D.?” through “How did other researchers
successfully tackle difficult situations?” to “How to maneuver a male-dominated community?”, it turns out that many questions of how to be successful are often left unanswered atcommunity meetings.
Several participants are hoping for a mentoring program that goes along conferences oran introduction service for new-comers. Women in IR is considering offering such a matchmaking service at future meetings. Recipes for how to best encourage women to come andstay through incentives and funding need to be elaborated in the future.

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We are happy to hear from Yuka Egusa and Emi Ishita that fathers and mothers will finda child care facility at the 40th ACM SIGIR meeting.

Other Meetings
Women in IR was formed in August 2015, and has hosted several meetings in conferences,beginning with a coffee break at SIGIR 2015 in Santiago, Chile, attended by 29 female
researchers, followed by a second meeting that included ten women at ICTIR 2015 inNorthampton, Massachusetts, and a third meeting in ECIR 2016 in Padua, Italy, wheremore than 16 women got together. At ICTIR 2016 in Newark, Delaware seven women andseveral men discussed perceived biases, observable issues, and potential solutions.

Future WorkMoving forward, we will maintain our current activities and explore additional projects. Inorder to do so we need the support of volunteers. Specifically we are looking for volunteers toorganize meetings in conferences, mentor, and lead initiatives that will serve our community.
Supporters of both genders are welcome.

Contact
Please join our mailing list available on:https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/women-in-ir.
Visit our website: http://www.womeninir.com.
Follow us on twitter through @WomenInIR.
If you want to support us, please contact the co-founders directly.

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