SUMMER SCHOOL REPORT

2nd Asian Summer School in Information Access (ASSIA 2015)
http://assia2015.lib.ntnu.edu.tw
Hao-Ren Ke
National Taiwan Normal University
clavenke@ntnu.edu.tw
Hideo Joho
University of Tsukuba
hideo@slis.tsukuba.ac.jp

Abstract
The second Asian Summer School in Information Access (ASSIA 2015) was held between 24th and 27th
August, 2015 in Taipei City, Taiwan, R.O.C. The summer school offered 10 lectures in Information Retrieval,Social Media Search, and related topics, along with one panel discussion, a poster session, and a session fromcommercial sectors and young scholars. This reports a successful international summer school in Asia
attracting a total of 45 participants from the range of countries in Asia and Europe.

1Introduction

The summer schools in Information Retrieval have been very successful in Europe where research
students, young faculty members, or industrial researchers can gather together to learn the core andadvanced topics from the world-class experts in the field. However, no such opportunity wasavailable in most Asian countries. Following the success of the first Asian Summer School inInformation Access (ASSIA 2013), which was held in 2013 at Tsukuba, Japan, the 2nd Asian Summer
School in Information Access (ASSIA 2015) was held between 24th and 27th August, 2015 in thecapital of Taiwan, R.O.C., the Taipei City. The International Conference Hall of the Library ofNational Taiwan Normal University was used as the main venue of the summer school.
A total of 45 people registered to the summer school (35 participants, 9 lecturers, and 1 organizer).
The majority of participants came from Taiwan, but there were also 12 participants from China,Japan, Malaysia, and Thailand. See Figure 1 for the group photo.

2Summer School ProgramASSIA 2015 had a 4 days program which included 10 lectures, 1 panel session, 1 session fromcommercial sectors and young scholars, and a poster presentation. The summer school opened its
program by having a welcome message from Hao-Ren Ke, the University Librarian of National
Taiwan Normal University and also the Organizing Committee Chair of ASSIA 2015.

ACM SIGIR Forum67

Vol. 49 No. 2 December 2015

Figure 1 Group Photo of ASSIA 2015 (Day 1)

2.1 Lectures
A total of 10 lectures were offered. Introduction to Information Retrieval was a 60-minute lecturefor providing the foundation. Advanced Information Retrieval Models, Evaluation I: systemoriented, and Search Interface were 90-minute lectures. All others are standard lectures (120 min).
The lectures had a good balance between IR theories and applications. A brief summary of individual
lectures is as follows.
Introduction to Information Retrieval (Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow) The main program
started with the introductory lecture on IR by Ounis. The lecture provided an overview of classicalsearch systems, their applications, and the challenges. In particular, the lecture described the core text
processing and retrieval techniques for search engines to find relevant documents for a user query.
Finally, the lecture concluded with current topics in information retrieval, as well as a summary ofcurrent resources useful for learning about and developing IR systems.
Advanced Information Retrieval Models (Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow) The second lecture
was given by Ounis as well. Firstly, the lecture introduced the purpose of a retrieval model. Then avariety of IR models including theoretically founded models, sophisticated probabilistic models, andmore complex machine-learned ranking models were introduced. This lecture covered a number ofadvanced and effective search models, such as field-based models, proximity models and state-ofthe-art learning to rank approaches, focusing on their intuitions, assumptions, their salient
characteristics and their uses.
Evaluation I: system oriented (Tetsuya Sakai, Waseda University) The final lecture of Day 1

ACM SIGIR Forum68Vol. 49 No. 2 December 2015

given by Sakai described some evaluation measures for modern information access tasks, how tochoose from available measures, and how to report experimental results in technical papers. Themeasures in the lecture covered average precision, normalized discounted cumulative gain, expected
reciprocal rank, normalized cumulative utility measures, diversified search measures, time-biased
gain, U-measure, and statistical significance tests.
Search Interface (Hideo Joho, University of Tsukuba) Day 2 of the summer school started withthe lecture on search interface delivered by Joho. This lecture looked at human factors in Information
Retrieval with focus on interactive features of search user interfaces. First, it provided backgroundknowledge such as major challenges faced by search engine users, and their behavioral patterns insearch. Second, the lecture looked at major components such query box and search result
presentation, and expanded them to query expansion techniques and result diversification methods.
Third, the lecture introduced some of the advanced topics such as multimodal interfaces andcollaborative search interfaces. Finally, the lecture discussed future directions of search interfaces.
Search User Behavior Modeling (Yiqun Liu, Tsinghua University) Liu gave the lecture onmodeling search user behavior. The first half of this lecture introduced existing efforts forunderstanding the cognitive behavior of search users and focused on the characteristics of searchusers’ querying, clicking-through and examination behaviors. The second half of the lecture
described some recent trends in search behavior modeling and focused on how to model user
behavior for supporting effective IR methods in heterogeneous environments such as information ofvarious media types, structure and semantics, short- and long-term search tasks, and users withdifferent background and preferences.
Social Media Search and Analytics (Ee-Peng Lim, Singapore Management University) Day 2ended with the lecture on social media search and analytics delivered by Lim. Following the socialmedia and its impact, the lecture presented a framework for social media search and analytics. The
lecture classified social analytics research roughly into text mining, network mining, network
dynamic mining, user profiling, and business analytics. Several social media search and analytics
studies that used Twitter data were introduced. Finally it described the challenges and future
directions.
Building digital archive systems for historians (Jieh Hsiang, National Taiwan University) The
morning lecture of Day 3 focused on using IR techniques to build digital archive systems forhistorians. This lecture given by Hsiang pointed out that historians usually consider documents asrelated, not independent as assumed by document retrieval systems. This lecture presented the designof a digital archives system for scholarly use. Instead of ranking the documents (as is done in theprecision/recall model), the proposed methodology returns a list of documents when issued a query,
together with a choice of textual contexts of the returned sub-collection as well as visual mechanisms
to observe, explain, and refine the contexts. Some typical contexts are chronological distribution,
geographical distribution, term frequencies and co-occurrences of people and places, relevancefactors, appositional term analysis, holistic comparisons of query returns, land transition graphs, andco-citation diagrams.
Linguistic Information Retrieval and Interactive Writing Environment (Jason S. Chang,
National Tsing Hua University) The last day of the summer school started with a lecture

introducing two systems for linguistic information retrieval, Linggle (http://linggle.com/) andWriteAhead (http://writeahead.nlpweb.org/), designed by Chang to demonstrate the workable

ACM SIGIR Forum

69

Vol. 49 No. 2 December 2015

linguistic IR applications. Linggle is a Web-scale linguistics search engine that retrieves short phrases
in response to a given query based on Google Web 1T corpus. WriteAhead is an Interactive Writing
Environment (IWE) that provides writing suggestions for writers.
Evaluation II: User Oriented (Muh-Chyun Tang, National Taiwan University) The second
lecture on evaluation were given by Tang and focused on user-oriented evaluation. First, the lecture
reviewed system evaluation from aspects of purposes and context. Second, it described operational
evaluation criteria. The main part of this lecture elaborated on basic elements in system evaluation,
including construct, criteria, measures, measuring instruments, and methodology.
Multimedia IR (Winston Hsu, National Taiwan University) Up till now, most lectures had

assumed text contents while the final lecture of the summer school given by Hsu brought theparticipants a broad and comprehensive coverage on the foundations and recent developments ofcontent-based and semantic-based image and video retrieval on large-scale image / video collections.
The lecture gave a balanced review of the area of content-based and semantic-based visual retrieval
for large-scale image and video collections by presenting topics of both practical and theoreticalinterest. Then it incorporated additional topics on the latest development of local features, coding
methods, efficient feature indexing, hash learning, scalable semantic detection, mobile visual search,etc. Furthermore, the lecture briefed recent huge improvements in visual analytics by deep
convolutional network (DCN).

2.2 Panel
The panel regarding how to write solid papers was held on Day 3. Lecturers shared their experienceson how to find a good topic, how to know this is a good topic. Reading papers from subject-related
journals, monographs, and conferences is essential for finding a good topic. Report improvement on
performance (such as efficiency and accuracy) may help the acceptance of a paper. Lecturers also
gave their suggestions on common pitfalls and writing proses. Participants raised issues on the review
process (such as how to deal with tough reviews), and how to choose a good publication venue tosubmit papers. Tasks in TREC, NTCIR, and CLEF were suggested as good resources to identify
future research in IR and related domains.

2.3 Talk from Commercial Sectors and Young Scholars
In the afternoon of Day 3, the summer school arranged a session that invited two speakers fromcommercial sectors and one young scholar. Willie Yang from eLand Technologies/Tornado Techpresented his experience in social listening and analysis by using the big data from enterprises andsocial networks. Yang introduced Tornado Enterprise Search / NLP Platform, comprising dataprocessing & integration, language processing, content analysis, mining & suggestion, andvisualization layers. This platform facilitates information retrieval, text mining, and knowledge
discovery. eLand’s OpView Listening Platform is the largest social listening platform in Taiwan.
Annie Yang shared cacaFly’s experience of being an authorized advertisement reseller of Facebook,Microsoft, and Google, and how they exploited information access techniques to achieve customized
and personalized advertisement. cacaFly’s new platform for real-time bidding (RTB) were presented
as well. Jilung Hsieh, an assistant professor of Graduate Institute of Library and Information Studies
at National Taiwan Normal University, described the use of mobile phones for daily life research.
Research methods such as time-diary method, experience sampling method, daily reconstruction

ACM SIGIR Forum70

Vol. 49 No. 2 December 2015

model, and prompted recall method were introduced.

2.4 Poster Session
Eight participants presented their posters in the afternoon of Day 1. The poster session lasted for one
and half hours and there was vivid interaction between presenters, participants, and lecturers. The
poster topics were quite diverse, covering information seeking behavior, ontology development,
automatic conversion from MARC (MAchine Readable Catalog) into FRBR (FunctionalRequirements for Bibliographic Records), Twitter search, search engine evaluation, and Web siteusability.

3Organization

Chinese Association of Library & Information Science Education (CALISE), Graduate Institute of
Library and Information Studies at National Taiwan Normal University, Interlibrary Cooperation
Association (ILCA) were the three main hosts of ASSIA 2015. Association for Computational
Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing (ACLCLP), Research Center for Knowledge
Communities at University of Tsukuba, and the Taipei Chapter of Association for Information
Science and Technology (ASIS&T) were the three co-hosts. The members of the organizing
committee were Hao-Ren Ke (National Taiwan Normal University), Hideo Joho (University ofTsukuba), Pu-Jen Cheng (National Taiwan University), and Nei-Ching Yeh (Shih Hsin University).

4Conclusion

The second Asian Summer School in Information Access was held in August 2015 at Taipei City,Taiwan, R.O.C. Comparing with ASSIA 2013, the participants of ASSIA 2015 were fewer. Despite
this, all lecturers and participants deemed ASSIA 2015 successful. The organizing committee
considers that a right time for the summer school (June, July, or August?), the involvement of local
scholars, travel and accommodation support for foreign students, and sponsorship from the industry
are essential for a successful summer school. We are currently forming a steering committee for longterm organization of the Information Access Summer Schools in Asia.

ACM SIGIR Forum71

Vol. 49 No. 2 December 2015