Report on the 1st International Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval (NewsIR16)

The news industry has gone through seismic shifts in the past decade with digital content and social media completely redefining how people consume news. Readers check for accurate fresh news from multiple sources throughout the day using dedicated apps or social media on their smartphones and tablets. At the same time, news publishers rely more and more on social networks and citizen journalism as a frontline to breaking news. In this new era of fastflowing instant news delivery and consumption, publishers and aggregators have to overcome a great number of challenges. These include the verification or assessment of a source’s reliability; the integration of news with other sources of information; real-time processing of both news content and social streams in multiple languages, in different formats and in high volumes; deduplication; entity detection and disambiguation; automatic summarization over time; and news recommendation. Although Information Retrieval (IR) applied to news has been a popular research area for decades, new approaches are needed due to the changing type and volume of media content available and the way people consume this content. The first international workshop on recent trends in News Information Retrieval (NewsIR) held in conjunction with ECIR 2016 emerges on these grounds. A new dataset consisting of one million news articles was also released to the research community as part of the workshop in order to foster research on a diversified number of media related projects. A total number of 19 submissions were received of which 12 were accepted for presentation. In addition to that, we had around 70 registered participants in the workshop who were pleased to attend the two keynote talks given by well-known experts in the field Jochen Leidner (from industry) and Julio Gonzalo (from academia). The workshop also included a breakout session to discuss ideas for a future data challenge in news IR and closed with a focused panel discussion to reflect on the day. This stemmed in stimulated discussions around new and powerful uses of IR applied to news sources and the intersection of multiple IR tasks to solve real user problems. In particular, several ideas were presented on solving complex information needs for media monitoring, event detection and summarization. Moreover, and going forward, the workshop concluded with a long list of suggestions for shared tasks, and dataset requirements.