Overview of LiLAS 2020 – Living Labs for Academic Search

Academic Search is a timeless challenge that the field of Information Retrieval has been dealing with for many years. Even today, the search for academic material is a broad field of research that recently started working on problems like the COVID-19 pandemic. However, test collections and specialized data sets like CORD-19 only allow for system-oriented experiments, while the evaluation of algorithms in real-world environments is only available to researchers from industry. In LiLAS, we open up two academic search platforms to allow participating researchers to evaluate their systems in a Docker-based research environment. This overview paper describes the motivation, infrastructure, and two systems LIVIVO and GESIS Search that are part of this CLEF lab.