After the very warm reception of the first and second edition, the third London Information Retrieval Meetup is approaching (21/10/2019) and we are excited to add more details about our speakers and talks!
After a short welcome & latest news speech from our Founder Alessandro Benedetti, we will proceed to the first talk.
first talk
How to Build your Training Set for a Learning to Rank Project
Learning to rank (LTR from now on) is the application of machine learning techniques, typically supervised, in the formulation of ranking models for information retrieval systems.
With LTR becoming more and more popular (Apache Solr supports it from Jan 2017), organizations struggle with the problem of how to collect and structure relevance signals necessary to train their ranking models.
This talk is a technical guide to explore and master various techniques to generate your training set(s) correctly and efficiently.
Expect to learn how to :
– model and collect the necessary feedback from the users (implicit or explicit)
– calculate for each training sample a relevance label that is meaningful and not ambiguous (Click Through Rate, Sales Rate …)
– transform the raw data collected in an effective training set (in the numerical vector format most of the LTR training libraries expect)
Join us as we explore real-world scenarios and dos and don’ts from the e-commerce industry.
the speaker
Alessandro Benedetti
FOUNDER @ SEASE
APACHE LUCENE/SOLR COMMITTER
APACHE SOLR PMC MEMBER
Senior Search Software Engineer, his focus is on R&D in Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning.
He firmly believes in Open Source as a way to build a bridge between Academia and Industry and facilitate the progress of applied research.
second talk
Music Information Retrieval Take 2: Interval Hashing Based Ranking
Retrieving musical records from a corpus of Information, using an audio input as a query is not an easy task. Various approaches try to solve the problem modelling the query and the corpus of Information as an array of hashes calculated from the chroma features of the audio input.
Scope of this talk is to introduce a novel approach in calculating such hashes, considering the intervals of the most intense pitches of sequential chroma vectors.
Building on the theoretical introduction, a prototype will show you this approach in action with Apache Solr with a sample dataset and the benefits of positional queries.
Challenges and future works will follow up as conclusive considerations.
the speaker
Andrea Gazzarini
RRE CREATOR
Andrea Gazzarini is a curious software engineer, mainly focused on the Java language and Search technologies. With more than 15 years of experience in various software engineering areas, his adventure in the search world began in 2010, when he met Apache Solr and later Elasticsearch.
