Martin Braschler – författare

This book has two main goals: to define data science through the work of data scientists and their results, namely data products, while simultaneously providing the reader with relevant lessons learned from applied data science projects at the intersection of academia and industry. As such, it is not a replacement for a classical textbook (i.e., it does not elaborate on fundamentals of methods and principles described elsewhere), but systematically highlights the connection between theory, on the one hand, and its application in specific use cases, on the other.   With these goals in mind, the book is divided into three parts: Part I pays tribute to the interdisciplinary nature of data science and provides a common understanding of data science terminology for readers with different backgrounds. These six chapters are geared towards drawing a consistent picture of data science and were predominantly written by the editors themselves. Part II then broadens the spectrum by presenting views and insights from diverse authors – some from academia and some from industry, ranging from financial to health and from manufacturing to e-commerce. Each of these chapters describes a fundamental principle, method or tool in data science by analyzing specific use cases and drawing concrete conclusions from them. The case studies presented, and the methods and tools applied, represent the nuts and bolts of data science. Finally, Part III was again written from the perspective of the editors and summarizes the lessons learned that have been distilled from the case studies in Part II. The section can be viewed as a meta-study on data science across a broad range of domains, viewpoints and fields. Moreover, it provides answers to the question of what the mission-critical factors for success in different data science undertakings are.  

The book targets professionals as well as students of data science:first, practicing data scientists in industry and academia who want to broaden their scope and expand their knowledge by drawing on the authors’ combined experience. Second, decision makers in businesses who face the challenge of creating or implementing a data-driven strategy and who want to learn from success stories spanning a range of industries. Third, students of data science who want  to understand both the theoretical and practical aspects of data science, vetted by real-world case studies at the intersection of academia and industry.

The conference has a clear focus on experimental information retrieval with special attention to the challenges of multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search ranging from unstructured to semi structures and structured data. The 7 full papers and 8 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. This year, many contributions tackle the social networks with the detection of stances or early identification of depression signs on Twitter in a cross-lingual context.

Further this volume presents 7 “best of the labs” papers which were reviewed as a full paper submission with the same review criteria. The labs represented scientific challenges based on new data sets and real world problems in multimodal and multilingual information access. In addition to this, 9 benchmarking labs reported results of their yearlong activities in overview talks and lab sessions.

We are living in a multilingual world and the diversity in languages which are used to interact with information access systems has generated a wide variety of challenges to be addressed by computer and information scientists. The growing amount of non-English information accessible globally and the increased worldwide exposure of enterprises also necessitates the adaptation of Information Retrieval (IR) methods to new, multilingual settings.

Peters, Braschler and Clough present a comprehensive description of the technologies involved in designing and developing systems for Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR). They provide readers with broad coverage of the various issues involved in creating systems to make accessible digitally stored materials regardless of the language(s) they are written in. Details on Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) are also covered that help readers to understand how to develop retrieval systems that cross language boundaries. Their work is divided into six chapters and accompanies the reader step-by-step through the various stages involved in building, using and evaluating MLIR systems. The book concludes with some examples of recent applications that utilise MLIR technologies. Some of the techniques described have recently started to appear in commercial search systems, while others have the potential to be part of future incarnations.

The book is intended for graduate students, scholars, and practitioners with a basic understanding of classical text retrieval methods. It offers guidelines and information on all aspects that need to be taken into consideration when building MLIR systems, while avoiding too many ‘hands-on details’ that could rapidly become obsolete. Thus it bridges the gap between the material covered by most of the classical IR textbooks and the novel requirements related to the acquisition and dissemination of information in whatever language it is stored.