CIIR

CIIR, the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, is a research center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst dedicated to information retrieval, natural language processing, and related machine learning methods. Located within the College of Information and Computer Sciences, CIIR brings together faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and students to investigate how people search for and interact with information across text, web, and multimedia sources.

Research programs span retrieval models and ranking, learning-based approaches to IR, interactive search and user modeling, cross-language and multilingual information retrieval, web and social media mining, and multimedia information retrieval. The center emphasizes methodological advances, empirical evaluation, and real-world applications, with attention to scalability, robustness, and fairness in information access.

CIIR collaborates with other academic departments, national labs, and industry partners to contextualize research questions and translate findings into practice. It hosts seminars, workshops, and visiting researchers, and disseminates results through publications, datasets, benchmarks, and open-source software when available.

Graduates and researchers affiliated with CIIR contribute to academia and industry, and the center maintains a presence in major information retrieval conferences and related communities. Through its activities, CIIR aims to advance intelligent systems that help people find, understand, and use information more effectively.