Report on the 3rd Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop(DIR-2002)
Rik De Busser
Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and IT
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Leuven, Belgium
rik.debusser@law.kuleuven.ac.be

1 Introduction
In the Low Countries, interest in information retrieval, the discipline that is mainly
concerned with identifying information in document or multimedia collections, has beenmodest but steady throughout the years. In 2000, this led to the first Dutch-BelgianInformation Retrieval Workshop (DIR) at the University of Maastricht (the Netherlands).
Two years later, the third edition of DIR shows that the IR community in Belgium and theNetherlands is more alive than ever. Organized by ICRI/LIIR (the research group Legal
Informatics and IR of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and IT, K.U.Leuven, Belgium) incooperation with SIKS (Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems) andthe IWT Flanders, DIR-2002 received considerable attention from researchers and students
from the Netherlands, Belgium, and – notwithstanding the local focus – various othercountries. Altogether, more than 80 participants registered for the workshop. The localorganizers were Marie-Francine Moens (K.U.Leuven, Belgium), Djoerd Hiemstra (Universityof Twente, the Netherlands) and Wessel Kraaij (TNO Delft, the Netherlands).
Unlike DIR-2001, which focussed on user interaction and adaptive methods in IR, theorganizers of the 2002 workshop had opted for keeping the subject matter as diverse aspossible. Fourteen presentations and a keynote speech were crammed into a tight one-day
schedule, covering an array of IR subjects as diverse as XML, video retrieval, cross-language
IR, and IR from historical corpora. Candidate speakers were invited to submit an extended
abstract, which was checked by an international committee of reviewers. We were very happy
that all speakers later also submitted a full paper, although this was by no means aprerequisite for the workshop. All papers and an abstract of the keynote speech are bundled
into an electronic volume, which is available at http://www.law.kuleuven.ac.be/icri/proceedings_dir.php.

2 The presentations
The morning started off with the keynote lecture of Karen Sparck Jones (Cambridge,UK). Unfortunately, some grave circumstances prevented Prof. Sparck Jones to attend themeeting, but she managed to record a vivid speech on videotape – Language and information:
old ideas revisited and new ones considered – in which she discussed the pros and cons ofstatistical techniques for language information processing (LIP) in a historical context ([10]).
She argued that, although some radical progress has been made in the field of statisticallanguage processing during the previous decade, these developments were to a considerable
extent a continuation of ideas that had already been developed in the 1950s and 1960s andthat there was still considerable room for innovation, both in purely statistical LIP and forhybrid techniques.

Apart from the keynote speech, the five talks in the forenoon focussed on IR from semistructured documents and multimedia information retrieval, both of which are issues thatcurrently seem to be very much in the spotlight in the IR world. The first three talks ([9], [7]and [6]) covered the former subject and affirmed the increasing importance of XML for
information retrieval; the latter two ([2] and [12]) dealt with content-based image retrieval.
During the second session of five talks in the afternoon – after a copious though rather hastylunch in a historical farmstead – the theme shifted towards the use of natural language
processing in IR ([5], [11], [1], [13] and [8]). Roughly, presentations either dealt withevaluating the effectiveness of complementing traditional IR techniques with NLP or withissues concerning lexical cohesion. The last session of the day started off with three talks inthe field of cross-lingual IR ([4], [14] and [15]) and the day closed with a highly interestingpresentation on information retrieval from historical corpora ([3]).

3 Conclusion
All in all, the Third Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop was a success.
Attendance was a lot higher than was expected, as was the quality of the submissions. Maybe
the large number of presentations demanded some perseverance of the attendants, but it also
ensured a diverse view on the Dutch and Belgian IR scene. We can only advice all that areinterested to keep an eye on the next DIR, which will be organized by the University of
Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Further information on DIR-2002 can be found on
http://www.law.kuleuven.ac.be/icri/seminars.php?id=7&where=.

4 Acknowledgements
The organisers would like to thank the sponsors – the Dutch Research School for
Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) and IWT Flanders – for their kind support. They
would also like to express their thanks to the team of reviewers for the effort they put into
correcting the submissions.

References[1]

Angheluta, R. & M.-F. Moens. A study of synonym replacement in news corpora. Ibid., 58-63.

[2]

Boldareva, L.V.; D. Hiemstra & W. Jonker. A scalable and efficient content-based multimedia retrieval
system. Ibid., 28-37.

[3]

Braun, L.; F. Wiesman & I. Sprinkhuizen-Kuyper. Information retrieval from historical corpora. Ibid.,106-12.

[4]

Diekema, A. Spurious matches in Dutch cross-language information retrieval: Lexical ambiguity,vocabulary mismatch, and other causes of translation error. Ibid., 88-95.

[5]

Kamps, J.; C. Monz & M. de Rijke. Combining morphological and n-gram evidence for monolingual
document retrieval. Ibid., 48-52.

[6]

Kamps, J.; M. Marx; C. Monz & M. de Rijke. Exploiting structure for information retrieval. Ibid., 20-7.

[7]Kosala, R.; M. Bruynooghe; J. Van den Busche & H. Blockeel. Information extraction from web pages
based on k-testable tree automaton induction. Ibid, 13-9.

[8]

Koster, C.H.A. & M. Seutter. Making phrases work. Ibid., 69-87.

[9]List, J. & A.P. de Vries. XML-IR: Coverage as part of relevance. Ibid., 7-12.

[10]Sparck Jones, K. Language and information: old ideas revisited and new ones considered. 5-6. In M.-F.
Moens et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Third Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR2002). Leuven: ICRI, 2002, 5-6.

[11]

Van Belleghem, K.; A. Vandecandelaere & L. Dehaspe. AlphaDMax: an integrated tool for biomedical
information retrieval and extraction. Ibid., 53-7.

[12]van den Broek, E.; L. Vuurpijl; P. Kisters & J.C.M. von Schmid. Object-based image retrieval: colorselection exploited. Ibid., 38-47.

[13]

van Gils, B. & H. Paijmans. Creating document surrogates with lexical cohesion. Ibid., 64-8.

[14]

Vervenne, D. et al. URUK, a platform for causal text retrieval. Ibid., 96-9.

[15]Volk, M. & P. Buitelaar. A systematic evaluation of concept-based cross-language information
retrieval in the medical domain. 100-5.