A Lightweight Environment for Learning Experimental IR Research Practices

Tools, computing environments, and datasets form the three critical ingredients for teaching and learning the practical aspects of experimental IR research. Assembling these ingredients can often be challenging, particularly in the context of short courses that cannot afford large startup costs. As an initial attempt to address these issues, we describe materials that we have developed for the "Introduction to IR" session at the ACM SIGIR/SIGKDD Africa Summer School on Machine Learning for Data Mining and Search (AFIRM 2020), which builds on three components: the open-source Lucene search library, cloud-based notebooks, and the MS MARCO dataset. We offer a self-reflective evaluation of our efforts and hope that our lessons shared can benefit future efforts.