The 6th SSR on Searching Speech: Evaluation of Speech Recognition in Context will take place on 5 July 2012 at the University of Twente. Invited speakers are:
- Gareth Jones (Dublin City University, Ireland)
- David van Leeuwen (University Nijmegen and Netherlands Forensic Institute)
- Lori Lamel (Limsi – CNRS, France)
SSR-6 is organized by Franciska de Jong, Laurens van der Werff en Thijs Verschoor, and will take place at the campus of the University of Twente at the Citadel (building 9), lecture hall H327. The event is sponsored by the Netherlands research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT). Please visit the SSR-6 home page for more information.
We report how users interact with an experimental system that transforms single- field textual input into a multi- field query for an existing travel planner system. The experimental system was made publicly available and we collected over 30,000 queries from almost 12,000 users. From the free-text query log, we examined how users formulated structured information needs into free-text queries. The query log analysis shows that there is great variety in query formulation, over 400 query templates were found that occurred at least 4 times. Furthermore, with over 100 respondents to our questionnaire, we provide both quantitative and qualitative evidence indicating that end-users significantly prefer a single field interface over a multi-field interface when performing structured search. 
A natural means of searching for related information would be to use a web search engine. The medical domain, however, imposes several key challenges on young and inexperienced searchers, such as difficult terminology, potentially frightening topics or non-objective information offered by lobbyists or pharmaceutical companies. To address these problems, we present the design and usability study of EmSe, a search service for children in a hospital environment.
MIREX (MapReduce Information Retrieval Experiments) is a software library initially developed by the Database Group of the University of Twente for running large scale information retrieval experiments on clusters of machines. MIREX has been tested on web crawls of up to half a billion web pages, totalling about 12.5 TB of data uncompressed. MIREX shows that the execution of test queries by a brute force linear scan of pages, is a viable alternative to running the test queries on a search engine’s inverted index. MIREX is open source and available at