entity search

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.

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.

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: