Overview of EIREX 2011: Crowdsourcing

TL;DR

EIREX 2011 is an educational experiment at the University Carlos III of Madrid aimed at teaching undergraduate IR courses through hands-on experimentation, creating a test collection, and fostering collaboration among universities.

Contribution

This paper presents the design, implementation, and analysis of the EIREX 2011 IR education experiment, emphasizing its role in teaching and resource creation.

Findings

Created a reliable test collection for IR education

Demonstrated the effectiveness of hands-on IR teaching methods

Encouraged university collaboration in IR resource development

Abstract

The second Information Retrieval Education through EXperimentation track (EIREX 2011) was run at the University Carlos III of Madrid, during the 2011 spring semester. EIREX 2011 is the second in a series of experiments designed to foster new Information Retrieval (IR) education methodologies and resources, with the specific goal of teaching undergraduate IR courses from an experimental perspective. For an introduction to the motivation behind the EIREX experiments, see the first sections of [Urbano et al., 2011a]. For information on other editions of EIREX and related data, see the website at http://ir.kr.inf.uc3m.es/eirex/. The EIREX series have the following goals: a) to help students get a view of the Information Retrieval process as they would find it in a real-world scenario, either industrial or academic; b) to make students realize the importance of laboratory experiments in Computer Science and have them initiated in their execution and analysis; c) to create a public repository of resources to teach Information Retrieval courses; d) to seek the collaboration and active participation of other Universities in this endeavor. This overview paper summarizes the results of the EIREX 2011 track, focusing on the creation of the test collection and the analysis to assess its reliability.