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.

Yahoo! Semantic Search Challenge

The 3rd Semantic Search Workshop (SemSearch’10) organized an Entity Search Challenge last year (see my notes from the event). This competition is being organized this year again. There are two tasks: entity search (queries refer to a particular entity) and list search (complex queries with multiple possible answers). The collection is the Billion Triple Challenge 2009 (BTC-2009) data set, which is the same as last year. Also, this is the data set we used at the TREC Entity track in 2010. So I encourage all TREC Entity participants to take part, and vice versa.
There is even cash price of $500 offered by Yahoo! for the winner of each task; it’s more of a symbolic reward than a real remuneration ;-) but anyways, it’s not the money we academics are after, is it?
The submission deadline is Mar 21. For more details see:

Switching colours


As of this month, I am a postdoc at the Database Systems research group, headed by Prof. Kjetil Nørvåg at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. I would like to say a big thank you to all my former colleagues in Amsterdam for providing an extremely friendly and inspiring research environment throughout the past several years. I wish you best of luck, and hope to see you at the next conference!

My research interests remain essentially unchanged: capturing, representing, and organizing information related to entities, in semantically meaningful ways. And, big data, of course.

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