Nominated for Best Paper link bibtex 2 citations resource conference paper
Appeared in: Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024)
Abstract:
A recent study has shown that students in IR~courses are especially motivated and learn more effectively when they participate in shared tasks as part of their coursework. We present a range of tools and resources to support teachers in creating such an integrated research and teaching environment. Based on TIREx and \irdatasets, our Web~IDE-based applications and tutorials cover the process of a typical IR~shared task and allow students to gain hands-on experience with experimental IR~research---from creating test collections over developing retrieval systems to making relevance judgments and finally statistically analyzing the results. Using our tools, IR~research coursework can be conducted on existing or new collections but can also be coupled with an upcoming shared task to which students can optionally submit their final approaches. We not only present our tools and resources, but also report on our experiences in implementing the corresponding teaching concept in four IR~courses for students at two universities. Our results confirm that students are very motivated to conduct research, and we also find that some of the resulting artifacts (e.g., students' test collections and retrieval approaches) are of genuinely high quality.
BibTeX @inproceedings{fröbe:sigir2024-ttrex, author = {Fröbe, Maik and Scells, Harrisen and Elstner, Theresa and Akiki, Christopher and Gienapp, Lukas and Reimer, Jan Heinrich and MacAvaney, Sean and Stein, Benno and Hagen, Matthias and Potthast, Martin}, title = {Resources for Combining Teaching and Research in Information Retrieval Coursework}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval}, year = {2024}, doi = {10.1145/3626772.3657886} }