The Georgetown University Information Retrieval Lab

The IR lab was started in 1998 at IIT. The lab is now growing as part of Georgetown University's Computer Science Department.

Members of the lab have graduated 39 PhD students (25 in IR/ML/NLP), published more than 100 IR, NLP and Text Mining refereed papers in top conferences and journals, have greater than 120 patents issued, and placed highly in TREC many times. Students have gone on to take key positions in major corporations such as BEA (now Oracle), Amazon, Max Plank Institute for Informatics, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Orbitz, AOL, BAE, Telecordia, and co-found companies including Summize (merged with Twitter in 2008). Others have taken academic positions.

News:

• Congratulations to Ophir Frieder for his induction to the Florida’s Inventors Hall of Fame in Oct 2023.
• Congratulations to our Lab’s alumni, Arman Cohan, for joining Yale University as Assistant Professor, (after a few years at Allen Institute for AI as Research Scientist), starting Spring 2023.
• Congratulations to our Lab’s alumni, Luca Soldaini, for joining Allen Institute for AI, as Senior Applied Scientist (after a few years at Amazon Alexa as Applied Scientist), 2022.
• Congratulations to our Lab’s alumni, Eugene Yang, for joining HLTCOE, Johns Hopkins University, as Research Scientist, 2022.
• Congratulations to our Lab’s alumni, Sean MacAvaney, for starting in his new position of Lecturer at University of Glasgow (equivalent to Assistant professor in US), starting Fall 2022.
• Congratulations to Ophir Frieder for being inducted into the inaugural SIGIR academy in 2021.
• Congratulations to Zachary Young for graduating Summa Cum Laude and receiving the Tropaia Computer Science Award!
• Congratulations to our Lab's alumni, Andrew Yates, for joining the Information Retrieval Lab at the University of Amsterdam as Assistant Professor in Fall 2021.
• Congratulations to Eugene Yang, Dave Lewis and Ophir Frieder for winning an DocEng 2021 "Best Student Paper award" for their paper "On Minimizing Cost in Legal Document Review Workflows".
• Congratulations to Eugene Yang for passing his doctoral defense in Summer 2021. Eugene will join the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins University as a Postdoctoral Fellow.
• Congratulations to Cristopher Flagg for passing his doctoral defense in Spring 2021.
• Congratulations to Tong Xiang for passing his master defense in Spring 2021.
• Congratulations to Sean MacAvaney for passing his doctoral defense in Spring 2021. Sean is currently a Research Associate at University of Glasgow.
• Congratulations to Hao-Ren Yao for passing his doctoral defense in Spring 2021. Hao-Ren is joining National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a Research Scientist II.
• Congratulations to Cris, Katina, and Nairen for passing their dissertation proposals in December 2020!
• Sean was awarded the Allen Institute for AI Intern of the Year Award!
• Nazli Goharian in collaboration with MedStar Researchers Raj Ratwani and Allan Fong are awarded a $1.5M R01 grant from the Agency for Health Care and Quality (AHRQ), to develop natural language processing solutions to process patient safety reports.
• Congrats to Dr. Mohammad Zaheri on his successful dissertation defense! group photo
• Georgetown IR Lab (Sean MacAvaney & Nazli Goharian) with collaborator from AI2, Arman Cohan, led the TREC COVID leaderboard in Round 1 and Round 2. TREC COVID is a challenge to create a search system to search and rank COVID-19 articles, with 46 teams participating in Round 1 and 51 teams participating in Round 2.
• Congratulations to Sean, Eugene, and Hao-Ren for passing their dissertation proposals in the Spring 2020!
• Ophir Frieder elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows!
• Lab's healthcare technology licensed by leading high performance computing company - Maxeler Technologies. (press release 1, press release 2)
• Arman has been named the recipient of the 2019 Harold N. Glassman Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Sciences!
• Sean was awarded the MWC ARCS Endowment Fellowship for 2019–20!
• The Information Retrieval Lab is hosted the Workshop on Computing for Physical and Mental Health on November 9, 2018
• Congratulations to Arman, Bart, Andrew, Luca, Sean, and Nazli for winning first place in the poster session at the 7th Annual Biomedical Informatics Symposium (ICBI).
• Congratulations to Ophir Frieder for his induction in Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe)
• Congratulations to Andrew Yates, who is now a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics.
• Our paper "SMHD: a Large-Scale Resource for Exploring Online Language Usage for Multiple Mental Health Conditions" was nominated for best paper and was selected as an Area Chair Favorite!
• Congratulations to Luca Soldaini for receiving Information Retrieval Lab Spirit Award (May 2018)!
• Congratulations to Arman Cohan for winning the 2017-2018 Dr. Karen Gale Exceptional PhD Student Award in Science!
• Congratulations to Luca Soldaini for passing his doctoral defense in Spring 2018. Luca is joining Amazon Alexa as an Applied Scientist.
• Congratulations to Arman Cohan for passing his doctoral defense in Spring 2018. Arman is joining Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) as a Research Scientist.
• Congratulations to Ophir Frieder for his induction in European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA).
• Congratulations to Andrew Yates, Arman Cohan, and Nazli Goharian for winning an EMNLP 2017 "Best Long Paper award" for their paper "Depression and Self-Harm Risk Assessment in Online Forums".
• Congratulations to Sean, Arman, and Nazli for winning second place in the poster session at the 6th Annual Biomedical Informatics Symposium (ICBI).
• The Information Retrieval Lab hosted the Innovation Health Workshop.
• Congratulations & all the best to Andrew Yates for starting Postdoc at Max Planck Institute.
• Congratulations to Jon Parker, Jason Soo, and Andrew Yates for passing their dissertation defenses in Spring 2016.
• Ophir Frieder joins UMBRA Global as CHIEF SCIENTIFIC OFFICER
• Congrats to Jonah Joselow for receiving the Computer Science Award today in the Tropaia award ceremony at Georgetown. This award is given anually to at most one graduating senior in CS.
• Congratulations Luca, Arman, Andrew, Nazli, and Ophir for winning second place in the poster session at the 3rd Annual Biomedical Informatics Symposium.
• Researchers recognized as leaders by national academy of inventors.
• We are looking for PhD students. If interested contact Nazli Goharian at nazli@ir.cs.georgetown.edu.