OpenGov Lab at ECIR 2025

A large part of the young ICAI OpenGov Lab team presented their work at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) in Lucca, Italy.
Naturally, the trip also included the forging of new ideas over Italian food 🍝.

Pepijn van Wijk, David Graus, Maik Larooij, Jaap Kamps, Damiaan Reijnaers, and Jan Hutter at ECIR 2025

Presentations

Jan Hutter

Jan pitched and presented the paper "Lost but Not Only in the Middle: Positional Bias in Retrieval Augmented Generation" during a poster session.

Paper

Hutter, J., Rau, D., Marx, M., Kamps, J. (2025). Lost but Not Only in the Middle. In: Hauff, C., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2025. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15572. Springer, Cham. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-88708-6_16

Pepijn van Wijk

Pepijn demonstrated his work: "Spoken Question Answering on Municipal Council Meetings" [1], a search interface over council meeting video transcripts.

Paper

van Wijk, P., Marx, M. (2025). Spoken Question Answering on Municipal Council Meetings. In: Hauff, C., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2025. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15576. Springer, Cham. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-88720-8_8

Damiaan Reijnaers

At the 2nd Search Futures workshop, Damiaan sketched a vision for embedding contextual information in rulings — making it possible to search permit documents, for instance, by terrace size.

Onward to ECIR 2026!

The conference was a great success — and next year ECIR will be hosted in Delft 🇳🇱, a true home game!