[Apologies if you receive this more than once]
The workshop program of the
SIGIR’14: 37th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference,
Gold Coast, Australia, 6-11 July, 2014
will host seven attractive workshops covering novel ideas and emerging areas in IR:
* ERD’14: Entity Recognition and Disambiguation Challenge
http://web-ngram.research.microsoft.com/ERD2014/
The Entity Recognition and Disambiguation Workshop will be organized as
a challenge, where participants submit working systems that identify the
entities mentioned in text. The challenge will have two tracks, focusing
on long and short texts. All submissions will be evaluated on shared
datasets; part of the data will be withheld, to be used for the final
evaluation of all submitted systems to determine the winners. Each
participating team will be offered a spot at the workshop to present
their system.
David Carmel, Yahoo! Research
Ming-Wei Chang, Microsoft Research
Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Google
Bo-June (Paul) Hsu, Microsoft Research
Kuansan Wang, Microsoft Research
* GEAR’14: Gathering Efficient Assessments of Relevance Workshop
https://sites.google.com/site/sigirgear/
Evaluation is a fundamental part of Information Retrieval, and in the
conventional Cranfield evaluation paradigm, sets of relevance
assessments are a fundamental part of test collections. In this
workshop, we wish to revisit how relevance assessments can be
efficiently created. Potential themes include methods for generating
assessments, the process of assessment, effort involved in assessing
different materials, exploration of the concept of relevance etc. A
discussion and exploration of this issue will be facilitated through the
presentation of results based papers and position papers on the topic,
as well as a group design activity.
Martin Halvey, Glasgow Caledonian University
Robert Villa, University of Sheffield
Paul Clough, University of Sheffield
* MedIR’14: Medical Information Retrieval Workshop
Medical information is accessible from diverse sources including the
general web, social media, journal articles, and hospital records; users
include patients and their families, researchers, practitioners and
clinicians. Challenges in medical information retrieval include:
diversity of users and user ability; variations in the format,
reliability, and quality of biomedical and medical information; the
multimedia nature of data; and the need for accuracy and reliability.
The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in
medical information search with the goal of identifying specific
challenges that need to be addressed to advance the state-of-the-art.
Eiji Aramaki, Kyoto University, Japan
Lorraine Goeuriot, Dublin City University, Ireland
Gareth JF Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland
Liadh Kelly, Dublin City University, Ireland
Henning Müller, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland
Justin Zobel, University of Melbourne, Australia
* PIR’14: Privacy-Preserving IR Workshop — When Information Retrieval
Meets Privacy and Security
http://www.cs.georgetown.edu/~huiyang/sigir2014-pir-workshop/
Information retrieval and information privacy/security are two
fast-growing computer science disciplines. There are many synergies and
connections between these two disciplines. However, there have been very
limited efforts to connect the two. On the other hand, due to lack of
mature techniques in privacy-preserving IR, concerns about privacy and
security have become serious obstacles that prevent valuable user data
to be used in IR research such as studies about query logs, social
media, tweets, sessions, and medical record retrieval. This
privacy-preserving IR workshop aims to spurring research brings together
the research fields of IR and privacy/security, and mitigate privacy
threats in information retrieval by exploring novel algorithms and tools.
Luo Si (Purdue University, USA)
Grace Hui Yang (Georgetown University, USA)
* SMIR’14: Semantic Matching in Information Retrieval
http://smir2014.noahlab.com.hk
Recently, significant progress has been made in research on what we call
semantic matching (SM), in Web search, question answering, online
advertisement, cross language information retrieval, multimedia
retrieval, and other tasks. Let us take Web search as example of the
problem. When comparing the textual content of query and documents, the
simple term-based approaches can fail when searcher and author use
different terms. A more realistic approach beyond bag-of-words, referred
to as semantic matching (SM), is to conduct deeper query and document
analysis to encode text with richer representations and then perform
query-document matching with such representations. The main purpose of
the workshop is to bring together IR and NLP researchers working on or
interested in semantic matching, to share latest research results,
express opinions on the related issues, and discuss future directions.
Julio Gonzalo, UNED, Spain
Hang Li, Noah's Ark Lab, Huawei, Hong Kong
Alessandro Moschitti, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
Jun Xu, Noah's Ark Lab, Huawei, Hong Kong
* SoMeRA’14: Social Media Retrieval and Analysis Workshop
http://www.cp.jku.at/conferences/SoMeRA2014/
The SoMeRA 2014 workshop will present and discuss cutting edge research
on all topics of retrieval, recommendation, and browsing in social
media, as well as on the analysis of user's multifaceted traces in
social media. In particular, novel methods and ideas that address
challenges such as large quantity and noisiness of user-generated
multimedia data, user biases, cold-start problem, or integrating
contextual aspects into retrieval and recommendation techniques are
highly welcome. The workshop will further foster the exchange of ideas
between different communities, in particular it aims at better
connecting the multimedia and recommender systems communities with the
information retrieval community. The workshop will feature both oral
presentations (full papers) and poster/demo presentations (short papers).
Markus Schedl, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
Peter Knees, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
Jialie Shen, Singapore Management University, Singapore
* TAIA’14: Temporal, social and spatially Aware Information Access Workshop
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/milads/taia2014.aspx
Users provide an unprecedented volume of detailed, and continuously
updated information about where they are, what they are doing, who they
are with, and what they are thinking and feeling about their activities.
The provision of this stream creates an informal contract between the
user and the information access application in which the user will
provide the information, but the application must provide results that
are contextually relevant. In this workshop we explore spatial and
temporal context in dynamic geotagged collections, such as Wikipedia,
and traditional news sources, as well as social media sites such as
Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and Flickr. To ground the workshop, and
provide a locus for discussion of the two aspects of user context, we
focus on event detection and recommendation. Events are a natural theme
around which to center discussions of spatial and temporal context
because events are defined by their time and place.
Fernando Diaz, Microsoft Research
Claudia Hauff, Delft University of Technology
Vanessa Murdock, Microsoft
Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam
Milad Shokouhi, Microsoft
Please look at the individual websites for the calls, and deadlines —
and participate in the discussion on the SIGIR’14 workshop day, on
Friday 11 July 2014, in the beautiful scenery of Gold Coast, Queensland,
Australia.