Event reports

The June 2022 issue of SIGIR Forum reports on two events that I co-organized:

Workshop on Personal Knowledge Graphs

I’m co-organizing a workshop on Personal Knowledge Graphs at the Automatic Knowledge Base Construction Conference (AKBC’21).

The concept of personal knowledge graphs has been around for a while, in recognition of the need to represent structured information about entities that are personally related to a user. However, several open questions remain regarding its definition, construction, population, utilization, and practical realization. The workshop aims to bring different communities together to discuss these issues and create a shared research agenda.

We solicit both regular papers, position paper, demonstrators, as well as encore talks, i.e., presentation of work that has already been published in a leading conference or journal. Submission deadline: Sep 6, 2021.

For more details, visit the workshop’s website at https://pkgs.ws/.

SIGIR’21 workshop on Simulation for IR Evaluation

I’m co-organizing a workshop on Simulation for IR Evaluation at SIGIR this year. Below is an extract from the CfP:

Simulation techniques are not foreign to information retrieval. Simulation has been employed, for example, for constructing test collections and for model performance prediction and analysis in a broad array of information access scenarios. The need for simulation has become ever more apparent recently with the emergence of areas where other types of evaluation are infeasible. One such area is conversational information access, where human evaluation is both time and resource intensive at scale. Another example is provided by settings that do not allow sharing of data, e.g., because of privacy constraints, and therefore necessitate the creation of synthetic test collections.

Despite the apparent need, a standardized methodology for performance evaluation via simulation has not yet been developed. The goal of the Sim4IR workshop is to create a forum for researchers and practitioners to promote methodology development and more widespread use of simulation for evaluation by: (i) identifying problem settings and application scenarios; (ii) sharing tools, techniques, and experiences; (iii) characterizing potentials and limitations; and (iv) developing a research agenda.

Submission deadlines: May 4 (regular/short/demo papers) and May 18 (encore talks).
Visit sim4ir.org for more details.

ESAIR’16 CfP

The continuing goal of the Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval (ESAIR) workshop series is to create a forum for researchers interested in the application of semantic annotations for information access tasks. ESAIR’16 sets its focus on personal mobile applications and will be held in conjunction with CIKM’16 at Indianapolis, USA in October.

Important dates:

  • Position paper submission (2+1 pages): Aug 1, 2016
  • Demo submission (4+ pages): Aug 8, 2016
  • Acceptance notification: 22 August, 2016
  • Camera-ready version: 1 September, 2016

ESAIR’15 CfP

The Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval (ESAIR) workshop series aims to advance the general research agenda on the problem of creating and exploiting semantic annotations. The eighth edition of ESAIR, with a renewed set of organizers, sets its focus on applications. We invite presentations of prototype systems in a dedicated “Annotation in Action” demo track, in addition to the regular research and position paper contributions. A Best Demonstration Award, sponsored by Google, will be presented to the authors of the most outstanding demo at the workshop.

Submissions: regular research papers (4+ pages), position papers (2+1 pages), demo papers (4+ pages)
Deadline: July 2nd

The workshop also offers a track for authors of papers that were not successful at the main conference for their work to be considered for presentation at the workshop; the deadline for these contributions is July 8. In this case, authors are required to attach the reviews for their paper along with the paper so as to facilitate the decision process.

See the workshop’s homepage for details.