Mar 12, 2024
Information Retrieval Hackathon at the Chair of Databases
The participants of the Information Retrieval Hackathon from March 4-8 at the Chair of Databases made a contribution to the development of a European infrastructure as a basis for web search engines. The nine students had the task of working in teams to further develop important components for the European Union's Open Web Search research program.
One team integrated the quantification of the readability of websites, which is an important building block for the development of a search engine for children. Another team used large language models such as ChatGPT to automatically replace the search query with semantically synonymous search queries in the background. This is an important element for optimizing search results for queries from people who do not yet know the technical terms to be determined.
The results will be presented at the 1st International Workshop on Open Web Search, which will take place as part of the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR from March 24-28 in Glasgow.
The hackathon was organized and carried out by Anja Reusch and Julius Gonsior, both PhD students at the Chair of Databases. They were supported by Maik Fröbe, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, who is part of the Open Web Search Initiative.