he/him · Reader (Assoc. Professor) at @GlasgowCS @TerrierTeam · working at the intersection of IR&NLP · PhD from @Georgetown IRLab
Glasgow, Scotland
Joined June 2010
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Sean MacAvaney retweeted
🚨 Every major AI lab is racing to build better "deep research" agents — systems that search, synthesize, and report across the web.
But how do we actually *benchmark* them?
Introducing 🧵 TREC RAGTIME — the shared task for rigorous RAG evaluation.
trec-ragtime.github.io/
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
Delighted that our paper “PLAID-PRF — Pseudo-Relevance Feedback with Centroid-like Tokens in PLAID” has been accepted to #sigir2026, w/ Xiao Wang and @macavaney
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
The call for papers for CLPsych 2026 collocated with ACL 2026 is out and we have a shared task that is accepting applications!
We would love to learn more about your amazing work at the intersection of NLP and clinical psychology.
clpsych.org/call-for-papers/
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
PyTerrier 1.0 has been released:
- ➡️ search pipeline validation, visualisation and verification
- 📘more documentation
- ☕️ java now optional
🆕📰github.com/terrier-org/pyter…
Try pip install pyterrier[all]
w/ @macavaney
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
I will present our paper “Breaking the lens of the Telescope: Online Relevance Estimation over Large Retrieval Sets” at #SIGIR2025
🕰️ 10:30 AM (16.07.2025)
📍Location: GIOTTO (Floor 0)
Full Paper: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/37263…
Slides: sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/detai…
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
@joelmmackenzie kicking off the #SIGIR2025 tutorial on efficient in-memory inverted indexes w/ @macavaney and @antonio_mallia
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
Starting #SIGIR2025 with @macavaney and a tutorial on "Efficient In-Memory Inverted Indexes: Theory and Practice" @ir_glasgow
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
🚨 New Pre-Print! You've just added your 600th model to your negative mining pool and filtered all false negatives. Does any of this even matter when we can apply distillation?
In this work with @debforit and @macavaney, we explore data selection in modern ranking. 🧵 Below
Disentangling Locality and Entropy in Ranking Distillation
@MrParryParry et al. separate example selection effects from teacher ranking entropy in neural ranking model optimization, showing complex hard-negative pipelines offer minimal gains.
📝arxiv.org/abs/2505.21058
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
CLPsych 2025 @naaclmeeting is happening soon! We're looking forward to seeing you all. Stay tuned for the Best Poster Award, which will be voted on the day of the workshop after the poster session.
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
Want to help shape the next generation of RAG systems?
TREC RAGTIME focuses on long-form report generation, including sources from multiple languages.
ALT TREC RAGTIME Logo
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
It was a really pleasant surprise to learn that our paper “Efficient Constant-Space Multi-Vector Retrieval” aka ConstBERT, co-authored with @macavaney and @ntonellotto received the Best Short Paper Honourable Mention at ECIR 2025!
#ECIR2025 #IR #Pinecone
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
🚨 New Pre-Print!🚨 with @macavaney & @iadh. Stop using "translate-train" for all your multilingual needs. We explore zero-shot transfer for low-resource languages... 🧵
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
🛎️🛎️And today is the day!
Looking forward to reviewing all the fun idea on evaluating RAG systems!
Remember to submit it by the end of the day AoE!
SIGIR deadline is tomorrow. But Eval4RAG is also right at the corner!
📅 Submit your one-pager by this Friday (Feb 21) for presentation at the workshop!
eval4rag.github.io/
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
SIGIR deadline is tomorrow. But Eval4RAG is also right at the corner!
📅 Submit your one-pager by this Friday (Feb 21) for presentation at the workshop!
eval4rag.github.io/
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
🚨Remember to submit your short paper abstract today at #ICDCS2025🚨
Call: icdcs2025.icdcs.org/call-for…
Deadlines/AoE: 29 Jan (abstracts), 5 Feb (papers).
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
The abstract submission deadline for #ICDCS2025's posters is approaching! (15 Jan)...
🚨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…
Deadlines: 15 Jan (abstracts), 22 Jan (papers).
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
🚨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…
Deadlines: 15 Jan (abstracts), 22 Jan (papers).
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
Deadline is coming soon to submit your amazing work to CLPsych (end of January) clpsych.org/ via softconf softconf.com/naacl2025/CLPsy…
Sean MacAvaney retweeted
Great opportunity! Call for Poster Papers at #ICDCS2025
icdcs2025.icdcs.org/call-for…
Abstract Deadline: 15 JAN 2025
Submission Deadline: 22 JAN 2025