JIWES

JIWES summary

The First Joint International Workshop on Entity-oriented and Semantic Search (JIWES) was held on Aug 16, 2012 in Portland, Oregon, USA, in conjunction with the 35th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR 2012). The objective for the workshop was to bring together academic researchers and industry practitioners working on entity-oriented search to discuss tasks and challenges, and to uncover the next frontiers for academic research on the topic. The workshop program accommodated two invited talks, eight refereed papers divided into two technical paper sessions, and a group discussion.

In the forthcoming issue of SIGIR Forum we give a detailed summary of the workshop; the preprint of this article is available here. The workshop papers are available online in the ACM Digital library and at the workshop website. The latter also contains copies of the slides for most presentations.

JIWES@SIGIR’12 CfP

Call for Papers
1st Joint Intl. Workshop on Entity-oriented and Semantic Search (JIWES)
http://km.aifb.kit.edu/ws/jiwes2012/

WORKSHOP THEME
The workshop encompasses various tasks and approaches that go beyond the traditional bag-of-words paradigm and incorporate an explicit representation of the semantics behind information needs and relevant content. This kind of semantic search, based on concepts, entities and relations between them, has attracted attention both from industry and from the research community. The workshop aims to bring people from different communities (IR, SW, DB, NLP, HCI, etc.) and backgrounds (both academics and industry practitioners) together, to identify and discuss emerging trends, tasks and challenges. This joint workshop is a sequel of the Entity-oriented and Semantic Search Workshop series held at different conferences in previous years.

TOPICS
The workshop aims to gather all works that discuss entities along three dimensions: tasks, data and interaction. Tasks include entity search (search for entities or documents representing entities), relation search (search entities related to an entity), as well as more complex tasks (involving multiple entities—spatiotemporal relations inclusive—, involving multiple queries). In the data dimension, we consider (web/enterprise) documents (possibly annotated with entities/relations), LOD, as well as user generated content. The interaction dimension gives room for research into user interaction with entities, also considering how to display results, as well as whether to aggregate over multiple entities to construct entity profiles.

The workshop especially encourages submissions on the interface of IR and other disciplines, such as the Semantic Web, Databases, Computational Linguistics, Data Mining, Machine Learning, or Human Computer Interaction. Examples of topic of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Data acquisition and processing (crawling, storage, and indexing)
  • Dealing with noisy, vague and incomplete data
  • Integration of data from multiple sources
  • Identification, resolution, and representation of entities (in documents and in queries)
  • Retrieval and ranking
  • Semantic query modeling (detecting, modeling, and understanding search intents)
  • Novel entity-oriented information access tasks
  • Interaction paradigms (natural language, keyword-based, and hybrid interfaces) and result representation
  • Test collections and evaluation methodology
  • Case studies and applications

We particularly encourage formal evaluation of approaches using previously established evaluation benchmarks.

SUBMISSION INFORMATION
We invite submissions of regular research papers (max. 6 pages), position papers (max. 3 pages), and demo descriptions (max. 3 pages). All submissions will be reviewed by at least two program committee members, and will be assessed based on their novelty, technical quality, potential impact, and clarity of writing. Selection uses a standard double blind procedure. All accepted papers will be published as part of the SIGIR workshop proceedings and will be indexed in the ACM Digital Library.

Please, submit in PDF format to:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jiwes2012
Using the ACM SIG Proceedings style (for LaTeX, use the “Option 2” style):
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates

BEST CONTRIBUTION AWARD
The best contribution (paper/presentation) will receive an award sponsored by Yandex.

WORKSHOP FORMAT
The workshop will comprise of invited talks, oral presentations, and open-forum discussions.

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Submissions due: July 2, 2012 extended to July 9, 2012
  • Notification of acceptance: July 23, 2012
  • Camera-ready submission: Aug 1, 2012
  • Workshop date: Aug 16, 2012

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

  • Krisztian Balog (NTNU, Norway)
  • David Carmel (IBM Research Haifa)
  • Arjen P. de Vries (CWI/TU Delft, The Netherlands)
  • Daniel M. Herzig (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
  • Peter Mika (Yahoo! Research, Barcelona)
  • Haggai Roitman (IBM Research Haifa)
  • Ralf Schenkel (Saarland University/MPII)
  • Pavel Serdyukov (Yandex, Russia)
  • Thanh Tran Duc (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
To be announced.

CONTACT
jiwes.workshop@gmail.com