Harry Scells

@hscells.bsky.social

Assistant Professor @unituebingen.bsky.social @health-nlp.com, information retrieval researcher https://scells.me #IR #CS

Super happy that our paper “Topic-Specific Classifiers are Better Relevance Judges than Prompted LLMs” just won Best Student Paper at #SIGIR2026🏆 It argues against the reflex to reach for an LLM whenever you need relevance judgments. What we found 🧵:

BildBild

Melbourne is the place to be this week! 🇦🇺 #SIGIR2026 has officially kicked off, and while we miss Carsten Eickhoff, Harrisen Scells, and Gregory Polyakov back in the office, the Health NLP Lab is well represented in Melbourne this week.

Two papers accepted at SIGIR'26 in Melbourne! Both tackle the same question: how do we scale IR evaluation reliably without compromising on human judgment as the gold standard? Spoiler: LLMs-as-a-judge does not work. 🧵1/5

Bild

🏆 Congratulations to our #ECIR2026 Reviewer Award & SPC Member Award recipients! Your commitment to high-quality peer review keeps our community thriving. Thank you! 🙏

BildBild