Iadh Ounis

🎄PyTerrier Advent 23/25: You’ve done retrieval, but the results seem too homogeneous. Use a diversification reranker. Shown below is the implicit MMR diversification approach, instantiated on a BM25 or dense retrieval, but even an explicit approach like xQuAD (c.f. Rodrygo Santos) is easy to write.

🎄PyTerrier Advent 15/25: A very well-known learned sparse method is SPLADE. Our pyt_splade plugin makes it easy to use SPLADE by formulating Terrier indexing & retrieving pipelines that are composed with a SPLADE encoder, adding extra columns (e.g. query_toks).

Try it 👉 github.com/cmacdonald/p...

🎄PyTerrier Advent 8/25: Beyond sparse! PyTerrier_dr adds dense indexing & retrieval. Instantiate an encoder model, compose with FlexIndex. Retrieval is identical. Support models include: ANCE, TCT-ColBERT, BGE, E5, or any SentenceTransformer model.
👉 github.com/terrierteam/...

Title and authors of the paper.

Paper alert 🚨"Investors Are (Not) Always Right: A Comparison of Transaction-Based and Profitability-Based Metrics for Financial Asset Recommendations", with @richardmcc.bsky.social, Nikos Droukas, @craigmacdonald.bsky.social & @iadhounis.bsky.social has been accepted at ACM TOIS! 🧵(1/5)

Dr Sean MacAvaney receives the Best Search Project of the Year Award at the BCS Search Industry Awards on Wednesday 26 November.

PyTerrier, a software platform developed at
@uofgcompsci.bsky.social which helps facilitate the development of AI-powered search engines, has won a national award from @wearebcs.bsky.social!

Read more here: www.gla.ac.uk/news/headlin...

PyTerrier advent 2/25: Here's another classic one: Pseudo-Relevance Feedback. Here we retrieve with BM25, build a new query from the results with RM3, then execute the new reformulated query.

PyTerrier lets you see the transitions of datatypes (Q→R→Q→R) in the datatypes

🎄We want to try something new and fun this year – an “Advent Calendar” of PyTerrier pipelines 🤓

We’ll kick it off with *the* baseline: BM25 on MSMARCO. One line to download a pre-built index, one line to make a BM25 retriever, one line to search.

Keith van Rijsbergen Award | Glasgow Information Retrieval Group 𝗞𝘃𝗥 𝗔𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱 @ 𝗘𝗖𝗜𝗥 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 We are proud to sponsor the Keith Van Rijsbergen (KvR) Award at ECIR 2026. Keith van Rijsbergen is a pioneer of modern Information Retrieval, with a long history at the Univers...

We are happy to sponsor the Keith Van Rijsbergen (KvR) Award at #ECIR2026

📢 𝗡𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻!

Details and Submission Form at @ecir2026.eu website: lnkd.in/emecdsXm

🗓 𝗗𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲: 𝟭𝟱 𝗝𝗮𝗻𝘂𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲

www.linkedin.com/posts/glasgo...

Research Assistant / Associate | Iadh Ounis We are advertising a second Research Assistant/Research Associate (postdoc) position in the Glasgow Information Retrieval Group at University of Glasgow School of Computing Science as part of the EU ...

We’re hiring a 2nd RA/PDRA at @uofgcompsci.bsky.social for the EU CLIMINVEST Project! Work with @iadhounis.bsky.social, @craigmacdonald.bsky.social & Richard McCreadie on LLM-powered AI agents for ESG & risk assessment in green investment. Apply by Dec 15: www.linkedin.com/posts/iadhou...

Glasgow Information Retrieval Group | LinkedIn Glasgow Information Retrieval Group | 298 followers on LinkedIn. Founded in 1986, the Glasgow IR Group has been at the forefront of Research & Development in search and recommendation.

📢 We're also now on LinkedIn!

Follow the Glasgow Information Retrieval Group for updates on IR research, @irglasgow.bsky.social activities, events, and collaborations:

🔗 linkedin.com/company/glasgow-information-retrieval-group

#InformationRetrieval #IR #AI #recsys #RecommenderSystems #Glasgow

@iadhounis.bsky.social, General Chair of #ICDCS2025 with some lovely SICSA volunteers :)

A packed afternoon of great sessions is planned before the closing ceremony 🌟

Lots of positive vibes and inspiring conversations still happening 🙌

📢 We're off to #SIGIR2025 in Padova!

A large contingent of our students & staff will be at the main conference + tutorials, workshops & #ICTIR2025.
Let’s connect if you’re around! 🤝

Also: we're hiring in #FinTech — DM us if you're interested!
#IR #Hiring #Research #ACMSIGIR

Huge congratulations to our brilliant PhD graduates: @tjaenich.bsky.social, @mariavlachou.bsky.social, and @apetrov.bsky.social 🎉 It’s been a joy having you @uofgcompsci.bsky.social - We’re so proud of all you’ve achieved and can’t wait to see what amazing things you’ll do next! 👏 #PhDGraduation

Congratulations to @tjaenich.bsky.social who defended his PhD Thesis Fair Group-Based Exposure of Documents in Ranked Search Results 👏👏

Was a pleasure supervising your PhD along with @iadhounis.bsky.social. @irglasgow.bsky.social

Thanks to the examiners Dr. Sole Pera and Christos Anagnostopoulos!

Members of the Glasgow IR Group waving goodbye at the closing of the last day of ECIR 2025

Arrivederci #ecir2025 … and thanks for all the fish - see you all in Delft!

Congratulations to Manish Chandra, @gdebasis.bsky.social and @iadhounis.bsky.social for being awarded the Best Paper Award at #ECIR2025 for their work entitled “One size doesn’t fit all: Predicting the number of examples for in-context learning”. The paper will be presented Wednesday morning.

Yesterday, @ttsamurai.bsky.social has been busy at #ECIR2025, demoing FinPersona (w/ M Suzuki l, K Izumi, @javiersanzcruza.bsky.social, @richardmcc.bsky.social & @iadhounis.bsky.social). Great to see many people interested in FinTech LLM agents!

Try Demo at: huggingface.co/spaces/TTsam...

A large contingent of our staff & students @uofgcompsci.bsky.social will soon be traveling to #ECIR2025. We'll be presenting our latest work in #search & #RecSys throughout the 5-day conference.

Looking forward to connecting with colleagues and friends in Lucca!

🚨 New Pre-Print!🚨 with @macavaney.bsky.social &
@iadhounis.bsky.social. Stop using "translate-train" for all your multilingual needs. We explore zero-shot transfer for low-resource languages... 🧵

Two days left to apply to this postdoctoral position in Responsible AI/IR as part of the PHAWM project at @uofgcompsci.bsky.social

Deadline: 26th March
Details: www.jobs.gla.ac.uk/job/research...

Medical Hallucinations in Foundation Models and Their Impact on Healthcare Foundation Models that are capable of processing and generating multi-modal data have transformed AI's role in medicine. However, a key limitation of their reliability is hallucination, where inaccurate or fabricated information can impact clinical decisions and patient safety. We define medical hallucination as any instance in which a model generates misleading medical content. This paper examines the unique characteristics, causes, and implications of medical hallucinations, with a particular focus on how these errors manifest themselves in real-world clinical scenarios. Our contributions include (1) a taxonomy for understanding and addressing medical hallucinations, (2) benchmarking models using medical hallucination dataset and physician-annotated LLM responses to real medical cases, providing direct insight into the clinical impact of hallucinations, and (3) a multi-national clinician survey on their experiences with medical hallucinations. Our results reveal that inference techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Search Augmented Generation can effectively reduce hallucination rates. However, despite these improvements, non-trivial levels of hallucination persist. These findings underscore the ethical and practical imperative for robust detection and mitigation strategies, establishing a foundation for regulatory policies that prioritize patient safety and maintain clinical integrity as AI becomes more integrated into healthcare. The feedback from clinicians highlights the urgent need for not only technical advances but also for clearer ethical and regulatory guidelines to ensure patient safety. A repository organizing the paper resources, summaries, and additional information is available at https://github.com/mitmedialab/medical hallucination.

Medical Hallucinations in Foundation Models and Their Impact on Healthcare
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05777

https://github.com/mitmedialab/medical_hallucination

About a week left to apply to this postdoctoral position in Responsible AI/IR at @irglasgow.bsky.social

Details are below. Deadline to apply: 26th March

Watching @iadhounis.bsky.social give a Keynote talk about reproducibility and PyTerrier pipelines in Tsukuba x Glasgow workshop on the Frontiers of AI. @irglasgow.bsky.social

🎉 #ICDCS2025 Registration Now Open! 🎉
Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity to:
🚀Inspiring keynote talks & technical sessions
🛠️Hands-on workshops & tutorials
🗣️Thought-provoking panel discussions & networking
🎊Exciting social events

icdcs2025.icdcs.org/registration/

Come work with us in Glasgow!

We are recruiting a postdoc at @uofgcompsci.bsky.social to work on understanding & measuring the harm of AI-driven IR approaches within various search contexts as part of the PHAWM project on Responsible AI.

Deadline: 26/03
Details: www.jobs.gla.ac.uk/job/research...

Happy to share that our paper entitled "A Multi-modal Large Language Model with Graph-of-Thought for Effective Recommendation" has been accepted by @naaclmeeting.bsky.social as a main conference paper, co-authored with @iadhounis.bsky.social. #NAACL2025

We have 2 tenure-track faculty openings in Machine Learning at @uofgcompsci.bsky.social; Applications are welcome in the general areas of AI & ML, which complement existing strengths in the @idaglasgow.bsky.social section.

Details at: jobs.gla.ac.uk/job/lecturer-s…

Deadline: 17 Feb 2025 at 23:45

Happy to share that our paper entitled “Enhancing Recommender Systems: Deep Modality Alignment with Large Multi-Modal Encoders” has been accepted by ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems - joint work with Zijun Long, @iadhounis.bsky.social, @craigmacdonald.bsky.social and @richardmcc.bsky.social.

🚨A week to go (!) before the poster papers abstract deadline for #ICDCS2025🚨
Submissions should be in the form of papers in a short format that are best presented as posters.

icdcs2025.icdcs.org/call-for-pos...
Deadlines: 15 Jan (abstracts), 22 Jan (papers).

GitHub - terrier-org/pyterrier: A Python framework for performing information retrieval experiments, building on http://terrier.org/ A Python framework for performing information retrieval experiments, building on http://terrier.org/ - terrier-org/pyterrier

We snuck out new releases in PyTerrier ecosystem in the last few weeks, with a number of 😍 changes…. 🧵👇 1/7
github.com/terrier-org/...
pyterrier.readthedocs.io

cc/ @irglasgow.bsky.social