Overview of EIREX 2012: Social Media

TL;DR

EIREX 2012 at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid was an educational experiment in Information Retrieval, involving students in creating test collections and analyzing their reliability to improve IR teaching methodologies.

Contribution

This paper presents the design and results of EIREX 2012, a novel educational approach involving students in IR resource creation and evaluation for undergraduate courses.

Findings

Successful creation of a reliable IR test collection

Enhanced student understanding of IR processes

Active participation of students in experimental IR research

Abstract

The third Information Retrieval Education through EXperimentation track (EIREX 2012) was run at the University Carlos III of Madrid, during the 2012 spring semester. EIREX 2012 is the third 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 2012 track, focusing on the creation of the test collection and the analysis to assess its reliability.