Meetup, News

London Information Retrieval Meetup [June 2021]

We are pleased to announce the ninth London Information Retrieval Meetup, a free evening meetup aimed at Information Retrieval passionates and professionals who are curious to explore and discuss the latest trends in the field.
This time we go fully remote, given the COVID-19 situation and the impossibility of hosting the event live.
The evening will be structured with 2 technical talks, with a Q&A session after each talk.

After a short welcome & latest news speech from our Founder Alessandro Benedetti, we will proceed to the first talk.

first talk

Lucene-grep

I’m going to present my pet project Lucene-grep. Lucene-grep is a multi-platform command-line full-text search tool that leverages Lucene to get the work done and have some fun while doing it.

My motivation behind Lucene-grep is to bring the awesomeness of Lucene to new places while making it simple to install and start hacking. This is an interesting task given that Lucene is a Java library that is viewed as old and just too complicated to hack with.

In the live coding session, I will show how to turn Lucene-grep from a simple full-text search tool e.g.
“`
echo “Lucene is awesome” | lmgrep “Lucene”
“`
into an alternative for the Elasticsearch Percolator.

the speaker

Dainius Jocas

Dainius is a Staff Engineer at Vinted, the company whose mission is to make second-hand the first choice worldwide.
His career is filled with plenty of projects where the goal always was to make search engines find things and do it fast.
He is an enthusiast of open-source software. He has made a command-line search utility called Lucene-grep.
Outside of work he enjoys having fun with his lovely Bernese Mountain Dogs.
He’s based in Vilnius, Lithuania.

video

second talk

Gathering Multiple Ratings w/ Quepid

At Haystack 2019, Tito Sierra and Tara Diedrichsen made the case for a Human Rated Testing program in improving search.

In this talk we’ll share an update on adding support for multiple judgements from multiple raters to Quepid, an open source tool for supporting HRT programs. We’ll talk about some of the analytics to measure how aligned the raters are, and solicit feedback from the community on next steps.

Lastly, we’ll do some live rating with the audience, to demonstrate some of pitfalls of human judgements.

the speakers

Eric Pugh

Fascinated by the craft of software development, Eric Pugh has been involved in the open source world as a developer, committer and user for the past fifteen years. He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and continues to be very active in the Solr and Tika projects, as well as avidly reads every commit to the Zeppelin project! Eric became involved in Solr when he submitted the patch SOLR-284 for extracting text from binary files (such as PDF and MS Office formats), that subsequently became the single most popular patch as measured by votes! He co-authored the book Apache Solr Enterprise Search Server, now on its third edition.

Dmitry Kan

Dmitry has been focusing on search engines since 2010 with Apache Lucene and Solr. He was responsible for building a search team and search technology powering AlphaSense product which today is used by thousands of reputed banks, hedge funds and companies in almost any industry vertical around the world. At Silo.AI Dmitry leads a team of NLP researchers and search engineers working on search at web scale, interacting with Product Management, Engineers and Data teams on a daily basis.

Dmitry has worked on open source projects Luke and Quepid and co-founded a few startups: in text analytics, edtech and lately team engagement space (Wowwlr).