Year: 2011

EOS workshop summary

The First International Workshop on Entity-Oriented Search (EOS) was held on July 28, 2011 in Beijing, China, in conjunction with SIGIR 2011. 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, eleven refereed papers divided into three technical paper sessions, and a group discussion.

You can find the workshop proceedings here. A summary report, to appear in the December issue of SIGIR Forum, is already available online.

A Living Lab for Product Search

Earlier today I presented the work by Leif Azzopardi and myself at the CLEF 2011 conference, entitled Towards a Living Lab for Information Retrieval Research and Development. A proposal for a living lab for product search tasks. The abstract follows:

The notion of having a “living lab” to undertaken evaluations has been proposed by a number of proponents within the field of Information Retrieval (IR). However, what such a living lab might look like and how it might be setup has not been discussed in detail. Living labs have a number of appealing points such as realistic evaluation contexts where tasks are directly linked to user experience and the closer integration of research/academia and development/industry facilitating more efficient knowledge transfer. However, operationalizing a living lab opens up a number of concerns regarding security, privacy, etc. as well as challenges regarding the design, development and maintenance of the infrastructure required to support such evaluations. Here, we aim to further the discussion on living labs for IR evaluation and propose one possible architecture to create such an evaluation environment. To focus discussion, we put forward a proposal for a living lab on product search tasks within the context of an online shop.

Full paper | Presentation slides

We are keen to get feedback from the community to see if we should continue to develop this initiative further. If you’re at CLEF this week, come talk to me.

TREC Entity 2011 timeline & guidelines

The timeline for the 2011 edition of the track has been set.
The guidelines are available at this address: http://bit.ly/entity2011-guidelines.
Please follow the track’s mailing list for the related discussion.

Note that it’s still time to sign up for TREC if you haven’t done so already.
Registration will close on May 27.

Entity-Oriented Search Workshop at SIGIR 2011

WORKSHOP OBJECTIVE
The objective of the workshop is to provide a forum to discuss entity-oriented search, without restricting to any particular data collection, entity type, or user task, and to solicit research contributions on topics including entity mining, entity ranking, query log analysis, or user context. In sum, the workshop seeks to uncover the next research frontiers in entity-oriented search.

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

  • Identification, resolution, and representation of entities (in documents and in queries)
  • Detecting, modeling, and understanding entity-oriented search intents
  • Novel search tasks concerning entities (e.g., search by example, attribute extraction, local/geographical search, etc.)
  • Entities in various media: Web, user generated content (social media sites, weblogs, microblogs, wikis, etc.), Linked Open Data
  • Integration of data from multiple sources
  • Personalizing entity-oriented search (e.g., using location or personal social network)
  • Test collections and evaluation methodology
  • Interfaces for entity-oriented search systems (including result representation)
  • Case studies and applications

SUBMISSION INFORMATION
We invite submissions of regular research papers, position papers, and demo descriptions, with a maximum 6 pages (using the ACM SIG Proceedings style). Our recommendation is to not use more than 2-3 pages for demo descriptions, 3-4 pages for position papers, and 5-6 pages for research papers, but there are no particular restrictions on that.
All accepted papers will be published as part of the SIGIR workshop proceedings (with ISBN number), and will be available online from the workshop website. The organizers will discuss the opportunity of editing a special issue with the IR journal or IP&M, and authors of the best quality submissions will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers (subject to the overall standard of submissions).
The best paper/presentation will receive an award sponsored by Yandex.

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Submissions due: June 10, 2011
  • Notification of acceptance: June 25, 2011

Go to the workshop’s homepage

TREC Entity 2010 overview

The TREC Entity 2010 overview paper is now available online. We will soon start the discussion about the 2011 edition on the track’s mailing list.