Dr Joel Mackenzie
Lecturer
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Researcher biography
I am currently a lecturer at the University of Queensland, where I conduct research in the field of Information Retrieval. My research focuses on efficient and effective representations for large-scale search engines, including indexing, compression, and retrieval. I am also interested in understanding how to measure improvements in the end-to-end search pipeline, including system-oriented effectiveness measurements and user behaviour analysis. I have a broad interest in empirical experimentation, operating systems, data structures, and algorithms.
Previous Positions
- From February 2020 to January 2022 I worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on an ARC discovery project with Professor Alistair Moffat at the University of Melbourne.
- I completed my PhD at RMIT University under the guidance of Professor J. Shane Culpepper and Professor Falk Scholer.
Journal Articles
Moffat, Alistair and Mackenzie, Joel (2024). How much freedom does an effectiveness metric really have?. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 75 (6), 686-703. doi: 10.1002/asi.24874
Moffat, Alistair and Mackenzie, Joel (2023). Efficient immediate-access dynamic indexing. Information Processing and Management, 60 (3) 103248, 1-24. doi: 10.1016/j.ipm.2022.103248
Mackenzie, Joel, Trotman, Andrew and Lin, Jimmy (2023). Efficient document-at-a-time and score-at-a-time query evaluation for learned sparse representations. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 41 (4) 96. doi: 10.1145/3576922
Mackenzie, Joel, Petri, Matthias and Moffat, Alistair (2022). Tradeoff options for bipartite graph partitioning. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, PP (99), 1-15. doi: 10.1109/tkde.2022.3208902
Mackenzie, Joel, Petri, Matthias and Moffat, Alistair (2022). Anytime ranking on document-ordered indexes. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 40 (1) 13, 1-32. doi: 10.1145/3467890
Mackenzie, Joel, Petri, Matthias and Moffat, Alistair (2022). Efficient query processing techniques for next-page retrieval. Information Retrieval Journal, 25 (1), 27-43. doi: 10.1007/s10791-021-09402-7
MacKenzie, Joel and Spina, Damiano (2021). Greetings from the ADCS 2021 General Chairs. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series 6.
Mackenzie, Joel M. (2020). Managing tail latency in large scale information retrieval systems. ACM SIGIR Forum, 54 (1), 1-2. doi: 10.1145/3451964.3451982
Benham, Rodger, Mackenzie, Joel, Moffat, Alistair and Culpepper, J. Shane (2019). Boosting search performance using query variations. ACM Transactions On Information Systems, 37 (4) 41, 1-25. doi: 10.1145/3345001
Conference Papers
Alanko, Jarno N., Biagi, Elena, Mackenzie, Joel and Puglisi, Simon J. (2025). Batched k-mer lookup on the Spectral Burrows-Wheeler Transform. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Publications.
Moffat, Alistair, Mackenzie, Joel, Mallia, Antonio and Petri, Matthias (2024). Rank-biased quality measurement for sets and rankings. 2024 Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific Region (SIGIR-AP ’24), Tokyo, Japan, 9-12 December 2024. New York, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3673791.3698405
Trippas, Johanne R., Gallagher, Luke and Mackenzie, Joel (2024). Re-evaluating the command-and-control paradigm in conversational search interactions. 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Boise, ID, United States, 21-25 October 2024. New York, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3627673.3679588
Trippas, Johanne R., Al Lawati, Sara Fahad Dawood, Mackenzie, Joel and Gallagher, Luke (2024). What do users really ask large language models? An initial log analysis of Google Bard interactions in the wild. SIGIR '24: 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Washington, DC, United States, 14-18 July 2024. New York, NY, United States: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3626772.3657914
Mansour, Watheq, Zhuang, Shengyao, Zuccon, Guido and Mackenzie, Joel (2024). Revisiting document expansion and filtering for effective first-stage retrieval. SIGIR '24, Washington, DC, United States, 14-18 July 2024. New York, NY, United States: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3626772.3657850
Fröbe, Maik, Mackenzie, Joel, Mitra, Bhaskar, Nardini, Franco Maria and Potthast, Martin (2024). ReNeuIR at SIGIR 2024: The Third Workshop on Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information Retrieval. SIGIR '24, Washington, DC, United States, 14 - 18 July 2024. New York, NY, United States: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3626772.3657994
Mackenzie, Joel and Moffat, Alistair (2023). Lossy compression options for dense index retention. 1st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific Region (SIGIR-AP), Beijing, Peoples Republic of China, 26-28 November 2023. New York, NY, United States: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3624918.3625316
Mackenzie, Joel, Zhuang, Shengyao and Zuccon, Guido (2023). Exploring the representation power of SPLADE models. ICTIR '23: The 2023 ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval, Taipei, Taiwan, 23 July 2023. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3578337.3605129
Bruch, Sebastian, Mackenzie, Joel, Maistro, Maria and Nardini, Franco Maria (2023). ReNeuIR at SIGIR 2023: The Second Workshop on Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information Retrieval. 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Taipei, Taiwan, 23-27 July 2023. New York, NY, United States: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3539618.3591922
Li, Zhixuan and Mackenzie, Joel (2023). Profiling and visualizing dynamic pruning algorithms. SIGIR 2023 - the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Taipei, Taiwan, 23 - 27 July 2023. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3539618.3591806
Mackenzie, Joel and Moffat, Alistair (2023). Index-based batch query processing revisited. 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2023, Dublin, Ireland, 2-6 April 2023. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-28241-6_6
MacKenzie, Joel, Mallia, Antonio, Moffat, Alistair and Petri, Matthias (2023). Accelerating learned sparse indexes via term impact decomposition. IIR 2023: Italian Information Retrieval Workshop, Pisa, Italy, 8-9 June 2023. Aachen, Germany: Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen Lehrstuhl Informatik.
Du, Jia Tina, Mackenzie, Joel, Nasim, Mehwish and Rybinski, Maciek (2022). Greetings from the ADCS 2022 Chairs. ADCS '22: Australasian Document Computing Symposium, Adelaide, SA, Australia, 5 - 16 December 2022. New York, NY, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3572960
Moffat, Alistair and Mackenzie, Joel (2022). Immediate-access indexing using space-efficient extensible arrays. ADCS '22: Australasian Document Computing Symposium, Adelaide, SA, Australia, 15-16 December 2022. New York, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3572960.3572984
Mackenzie, Joel, Mallia, Antonio, Moffat, Alistair and Petri, Matthias (2022). Accelerating Learned Sparse Indexes Via Term Impact Decomposition. Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing , Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 7-11 December 2022. Stroudsburg, PA United States: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Mackenzie, Joel , Petri, Matthias and Gallagher, Luke (2022). IOQP: A simple Impact-Ordered Query Processor written in Rust. DESIRES 2022 – 3rd International Conference on Design of Experimental Search & Information REtrieval Systems, San Jose, CA, United States, 30-31 August 2022. Aachen, Germany: Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen.
Moffat, Alistair, MacKenzie, Joel, Thomas, Paul and Azzopardi, Leif (2022). A flexible framework for offline effectiveness metrics. 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Madrid, Spain, 11-15 July 2022. New York, NY, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3477495.3531924
Mallia, Antonio, MacKenzie, Joel, Suel, Torsten and Tonellotto, Nicola (2022). Faster learned sparse retrieval with guided traversal. 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Madrid, Spain, 11-15 July 2022. New York, NY, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3477495.3531774
Trotman, Andrew, MacKenzie, Joel, Parameswaran, Pradeesh and Lin, Jimmy (2022). A common framework for exploring document-at-a-time and score-at-a-time retrieval methods. 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Madrid, Spain, 11-15 July 2022. New York, NY, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3477495.3531657
La Barbera, David, Roitero, Kevin, Mackenzie, Joel, Spina, Damiano, Demartini, Gianluca and Mizzaro, Stefano (2022). BUM at CheckThat! 2022: a composite deep learning approach to fake news detection using evidence retrieval. CLEF 2022 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum,, Bologna, Italy, 5-8 September 2022. Aachen, Germany: Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen * Lehrstuhl Informatik V.
MacKenzie, Joel and Moffat, Alistair (2021). Cost-Effective Updating of Distributed Reordered Indexes. ADCS '21: 25th Australasian Document Computing Symposium, Online, 9 December 2021. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3503516.3503528
Lin, Jimmy, Ma, Xueguang, Mackenzie, Joel and Mallia, Antonio (2021). On the separation of logical and physical ranking models for text retrieval applications. Second International Conference on Design of Experimental Search & Information Retrieval Systems (DESIRES 2021), Padova, Italy, 15-18 September 2021. Aachen, Germany: RWTH Aachen University.
Azzopardi, Leif, MacKenzie, Joel and Moffat, Alistair (2021). ERR is not C/W/L: exploring the relationship between expected reciprocal rank and other metrics. 2021 ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR '21), Virtual event, Canada, 11 July 2021. New York, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3471158.3472239
MacKenzie, Joel and Moffat, Alistair (2021). Modality Effects When Simulating User Querying Tasks. ICTIR '21: The 2021 ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval, Online, 11 July 2021. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3471158.3472244
Mackenzie, Joel, Petri, Matthias and Moffat, Alistair (2021). Faster Index Reordering with Bipartite Graph Partitioning. SIGIR '21: 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Online, 11 - 15 July 2021. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3404835.3462991
Benham, Rodger, MacKenzie, Joel, Culpepper, J. Shane and Moffat, Alistair (2021). Different keystrokes for different folks: visualizing crowdworker querying behavior. CHIIR '21: ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, Canberra, ACT Australia, 14 - 19 March 2021. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3406522.3446054
Mackenzie, Joel, Benham, Rodger, Petri, Matthias, Trippas, Johanne R., Culpepper, J. Shane and Moffat, Alistair (2020). CC-News-En : A large English news corpus. CIKM '20: The 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Online, 19 - 23 October 2020. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3340531.3412762
MacKenzie, Joel and Moffat, Alistair (2020). Examining the Additivity of Top-k Query Processing Innovations. CIKM '20: The 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Online, 19 - 23 October 2020. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3340531.3412000
Mackenzie, Joel, Dai, Zhuyun, Gallagher, Luke and Callan, Jamie (2020). Efficiency Implications of Term Weighting for Passage Retrieval. 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Online, 25-30 July 2020. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3397271.3401263
Lin, Jimmy, Mackenzie, Joel, Kamphuis, Chris, Macdonald, Craig, Mallia, Antonio, Siedlaczek, Michal, Trotman, Andrew and de Vries, Arjen (2020). Supporting Interoperability Between Open-Source Search Engines with the Common Index File Format. 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Online, 25-30 July 2020. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3397271.3401404
Petri, Matthias, Moffat, Alistair, Mackenzie, Joel, Culpepper, J. Shane and Beck, Daniel (2019). Accelerated query processing via similarity score prediction. 42nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Paris, France, 21-25 July 2019. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3331184.3331207
Mackenzie, Joel, Gupta, Kshitiz, Qiao, Fang, Awadallah, Ahmed Hassan and Shokouhi, Milad (2019). Exploring User Behavior in Email Re-Finding Tasks. World Wide Web Conference (WWW), San Francisco, CA United States, 13-17 May 2019. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3308558.3313450
Mackenzie, Joel, Mallia, Antonio, Petri, Matthias, Culpepper, J. Shane and Suel, Torsten (2019). Compressing inverted indexes with recursive graph bisection: A reproducibility study. 41st European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2019, Cologne, Germany, 14-18 April 2019. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-15712-8_22
Mallia, Antonio, Siedlaczek, Michał, MacKenzie, Joel and Suel, Torsten (2019). PISA: Performant indexes and search for academia. Open-Source IR Replicability Challenge (OSIRRC 2019), Paris, France, 25 July 2019. Aachen, Germany: RWTH Aachen University.
Gallagher, Luke, Mackenzie, Joel and Culpepper, J. Shane (2018). Revisiting spam filtering in web search. 23rd Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS), Dunedin, New Zealand, 11-12 December 2018. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3291992.3291999
Mackenzie, Joel, Macdonald, Craig, Scholer, Falk and Culpepper, J. Shane (2018). On the cost of negation for dynamic pruning. 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval Research (ECIR), Grenoble, France, 26-29 March 2018. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-76941-7_42
Mackenzie, Joel, Culpepper, J. Shane, Blanco, Roi, Crane, Matt, Clarke, Charles L. A. and Lin, Jimmy (2018). Query driven algorithm selection in early stage retrieval. 11th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, Marina Del Rey, CA United States, 5-9 February 2018. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3159652.3159676
Benham, Rodger, Liu, Binsheng, Gallagher, Luke, Lu, Xiaolu, Mackenzie, Joel, Scholer, Falk, Moffat, Alistair and Culpepper, J. Shane (2018). RMIT at the 2018 TREC CORE Track. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Benham, Rodger, Culpepper, J. Shane, Gallagher, Luke, Lu, Xiaolu and Mackenzie, Joel (2018). Towards efficient and effective query variant generation. First Biennial Conference on Design of Experimental Search & Information Retrieval Systems (DESIRES 2018), Bertinoro, Italy, 28-31 August 2018. Aachen, Germany: RWTH Aachen University.
Mackenzie, Joel, Scholer, Falk and Culpepper, J. Shane (2017). Early termination heuristics for score-at-a-time index traversal. ADCS 2017: The 22nd Australasian Document Computing Symposium, Brisbane, QLD Australia, 7-8 December 2017. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3166072.3166073
Crane, Matt, Culpepper, J. Shane, Lin, Jimmy, Mackenzie, Joel and Trotman, Andrew (2017). A comparison of document-at-a-time and score-at-a-time query evaluation. 10th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), Cambridge, United Kingdom, 6-10 February 2017. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3018661.3018726
Mackenzie, Joel (2017). Managing Tail Latencies in Large Scale IR Systems. 40th International ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in Information Retrieval, Shinjuku, Japan, 7-11 August 2017. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3077136.3084152
Mackenzie, Joel, Chen, Ruey-Cheng and Culpepper, J. Shane (2016). RMIT at the TREC 2016 LiveQA Track. 25th Text REtrieval Conference, TREC 2016, Gaithersburg, MD United States, 15 November 2016. Gaithersburg, MD United States: National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Mackenzie, Joel, Choudhury, Farhana M. and Culpepper, J. Shane (2015). Efficient location-aware web search. ADCS '15: The 20th Australasian Document Computing Symposium, Parramatta, NSW Australia, 8-9 December 2015. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/2838931.2838933
Data Collection
Mackenzie, Joel (2023). CC-News-En. The University of Queensland. (Dataset) doi: 10.48610/1dcb974