Workshops

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.

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

LHD-11 Call for papers

Workshop on Discovering Meaning On the Go in Large Heterogeneous Data 2011 (LHD-11)

Held at The Twenty-second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-11) July 16, 2011, Barcelona, Spain.

This workshop is designed to bring together people from different fields working in the area of dynamic matching, interpretation, and integration of heterogeneous data, so that ideas, techniques and problems can be shared and discussed in a broad context. A key part of this aim is attracting those from industry as well as those from academia.

In order to interact successfully in an open and heterogeneous environment, being able to dynamically and adaptively integrate data from other systems “on the go” is necessary. This may not be a precise process but a matter of finding a good enough understanding to allow interaction to proceed successfully. With the advent of the Web, there are massive amounts of information available online that can assist in this task, but this information is often chaotically organised, stored in a wide variety of data-formats, and difficult to interpret.

Deadline for abstract subsmission: March 14, 2011
Update: Submission deadline extended to April 4th, 2011

More info

SemSearch2010 workshop at WWW

The 3rd Semantic Search workshop (SemSearch2010) was held on Monday in conjunction with the WWW2010 conference at Raleigh, NC, USA.
This post is about the highlights of the workshop, with some personal comments at the end. For more information, check the post by Christian Grant, Jeff Dalton, and the #semsearch2010 hashtag on twitter.

Read more…

Seminar on Searching and Ranking in Enterprises

Today, on the occasion of the PhD defense of Pavel Serdyukov, a seminar on enterprise seach was held at the University of Twente. Three of Pavel’s committee members gave talks: David Hawking, Iadh Ounis, and Maarten de Rijke.
The summaries of the talks will soon be uploaded.
Of course, the main attraction of the day was Pavel’s defense. His PhD thesis is entitled The search for expertise: Beyond direct evidence. He was confronted with interesting, and, sometimes quite challenging questions, but handled them to the satisfaction of the committee. Congratulations Pavel, I mean, Dr. Serdyukov!