7th RIAO Conference

The conference is basically an Information Retrieval (IR) conference although papers cover wider topic areas than straight forward IR. For instance question answering, image retrieval and cross-language retrieval were all represented. The conference was being run by the University of Avignon situated in the picturesque town of Avignon in the south of France.

I was attending the conference to present a paper on a purely pattern based approach to question answering developed by Horacio Saggion and myself.

Previously in My Life...

Horacio and I originally submitted the paper that, lead me to Avignon, to ECIR '04 (http://ecir04.sunderland.ac.uk) which was held in Sunderland, UK. Fortunately for me it was rejected, probably because we both assumed the other had checked the page size of our submission and so we submitted a paper which was about four pages longer than allowed, oops!

My girlfriend, Bryony, having seen me go to Budapest last year, was adamant that she was going to get the time off work and come with me this time. This caused it's own problems as clearly the University wouldn't pay for both of us so I had to arrange and book everything and then claim my half back once the conference was over. So read on to see how much we enjoyed Avignon and the perils of on-line booking...

Sunday 25^th April

As we are travelling to Avignon on a Sunday this means we don't have much choice over the times for flights or trains to get us there. That is why it's 6am and we are loading our luggage into a taxi (http://www.airport-transfers-yorkshire.co.uk) to the airport. Fortunately the taxi driver seems like a really nice guy - just the right amount of random chat without making us feel like we have to keep up a conversation.

We arrived at the airport with plenty of time to kill before our 8:40am flight to Paris so first thing after checking-in was to find some coffee. Having ordered Americanos (what we usually drink) we found that Americano in Manchester must mean something different to what it means in Sheffield. The coffees were basically exceptionally large espressos - they certainly made sure we were completely awake!

As usual the flight to Paris was uneventful (the food was most definitely uneventful) but at least the weather was nice and pleasant. Now one thing I have never done before is travel any kind of distance in a foreign country by train. We found the train station without any problems as it's actually part of the Charles de Gaulle airport complex. Now I haven't learnt any French since I was about thirteen so I can just about manage hello and thank you but that's about it. Fortunately for me, Bryony is quite good at French (languages in general) so I knew I wasn't going to get completely lost. Anyway the departure boards at airports and train stations are roughly the same in every country I've visited and so it wasn't hard (given the details on the train tickets) to work out that our train was on time and which platform it would be arriving at.

So we grabbed a sandwich while we waited for the train. When it came time to find the platform we panicked a little trying to figure out how to punch our tickets in the machines that didn't seem to be working. Eventually we saw someone else validate their ticket and so we quickly did ours and made our way onto the platform. Now unlike trains in Britain it seems that on the TGV all tickets match a specific seat so you have to work out which carriage your seat is in and aim for it as the train pulls into the station, unfortunately the trains can be kind of long. Luckily for us out carriage ended up directly in front of us when the train came to a stop. The train journeys itself was pretty uneventful other than a bit of a panic as we changed trains in Lyon and were not sure we had made it onto the correct train. Although it looks as if the train station at Avignon is close to the centre of the city we decided to grab a taxi, what with having a suitcase each to carry. This was a wise decision as it certainly seemed quite a way from the station to the Hotel Kyriad in the Place de l'Horloge where I had arranged for us to stay.

Because of the early start to get to the airport we were both rather tired so we went for an early dinner. Now staying in the Place de l'Horloge is great for eating as nearly every building on the square is a restaurant and most of the square itself is full of restaurant tables, so not only is there a varied choice of where to eat but it's highly unlikely that you'll have problems getting a table. We choose to have dinner at the Hotel de Ville restaurant (I can't actually remember what either of us ate, although I think this is more the effect of nearly a year having passed before I'm writing this rather than the food being completely unforgettable).

Monday 26^th April

After breakfast I left Bryony at the hotel while I walked to the University to register at the conference. While registering I bumped into Paul Clough who works in the Information Systems department at Sheffield, two floors above where I work in the same building. He was scheduled to give one of the invited talks and it turns out had been on the same train from Lyon as us yesterday. Having registered I escaped back to the hotel and Bryony before the first session started (while this may sound like I didn't want to attend the conference it was more the fact that I had no interest in the sessions held on the first day and as I had personally paid to get there and register, although I claimed some of it back later, I didn't feel too guilty).

Now that we had the day to ourselves we decided we would start by visiting one of Avignon's two main attractions, Le Pont Saint-Bénezet. I have to admit that it is a bit strange seeing a bridge that just stops in the middle of the river. It was repeatedly damaged over the years by the flooding of the Rhone and eventually in the 17th century (I think) was left and not repaired. It's still quite interesting to walk out on the bridge and image what it used to be like on a windy night with no handrails I imagine it was extremely scary to cross. This picture was taken from the bridge looking back at the city of Avignon, and so while it gives a good view of the city (you can see the Popes palace at the back) it's difficult to see what this part bridge looks like, don't worry though because later on we crossed the road bridge to look at the Pont Saint-Bénezet from the other side of the river.

After the bridge we took a slow walk back to the hotel looking in the tourist type shops on the way to pass some time before lunch. As I've already mentioned the main square where we were staying has many restaurants and cafes surrounding it and so we had plenty of choice for where to eat lunch. We decided to try the Opera Café mainly as it was right outside the hotel and the food being served looked wonderful. I think Bryony had a seafood salad (which was huge) but I know for certain that I had the goats cheese salad - which was absolutely fantastic and has inspired me to put sun-blushed tomatoes with salad when ever I'm entertaining guests at home. We also had a half bottle of wine with lunch (hey it's kind of the norm in France so... When in Rome...) which was probably one of the best white wines I've ever had. It was the 2002 Cotes de Luberon from Chateau val Joanis and I would recommend it to anyone who likes a really good white wine.

I think the rest of the afternoon passed in a bit of a blur (probably the wine) and I think we spent most of it just relaxing and still recovering from the early morning the previous day. Again I can't remember what we had for dinner although from the stack of receipts (I had to keep them all to try and claim some of the money back) I know we ate at a restaurant called Le Venaissin.

Tuesday 27^th April

Today was the day the session at the conference included my presentation so I got up and had an early breakfast before walking to the university leaving Bryony at the hotel. My presentation went alright, other than the fact that I couldn't get the laptop I had lugged to the south of France to work with the data projector! I wasn't overly impressed by the other QA presentations, partly as they were mainly about Japanese langauge systems or systems I already knew of. Anyway after the session I had a really interesting conversation with Donna Harman from NIST who I first met in Budapest at EACL'03. In fact this conversation was the germinating moment for the pertainym expansion idea I would later present at the IR4QA workshop. At this point Bryony had found her way to the University and we slipped away before the next session, which again held no interest for me and was in no way related to my work.

I will finish this diary at some point but for now you'll have to look at the pictures to work out what we did while in Avignon.

Wednesday 28^th April

Thursday 29^th April

When we awoke we were kind of glad today was the day we were leaving. It was raining hard. Not only was it raining but there was an awful lot of standing water in the square outside the hotel. It certainly would not have been a nice day to be looking at the sights. After breakfast we ordered a taxi to take us back to the train station and got soaked just getting in and out of the taxi.

We had quite a bit of time to kill at the train station so we sat and had a coffee while waiting for the train to arrive. When it did arrive we got on and then panicked. Where we even on the right train as there were people sat in our seats. Turns out that the two kids on our seats had moved across the aisle to sit as far away from their parents as they thought they could get away with. A relatively uneventful train journey which included a quick trip to the buffet car got us safely back to the Paris airport this time without having to change trains.

After quite a long wait in the airport we had a totally normal flight back to Manchester, where for once it was sunny and quite nice. The taxi driver was just as friendly as the one on the way to the airport and had even provided some bottles of water for us. All too soon we were back in Sheffield and home, another holiday (I did do some work honestly) was over and we both had to go back to work.