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Call for Papers
First International Workshop on Semantic Matching in Information Retrieval (SMIR)
In conjunction with the 37th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR 2014)
July 11, 2014 in Queensland Australia
http://smir2014.noahlab.com.hk
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OBJECTIVES:
Recently, significant progress has been made in research on what we call semantic matching, in web search, question answering, online advertisement, cross language information retrieval, and other tasks. Let us take Web search as example of the problem. Web search still heavily relies on the term-based approach, where the relevance scores between queries and documents are calculated on the basis of the degree of matching between query terms and document terms. However, query document mismatches occur when searcher and author use different terms (representations), and this phenomenon is prevalent due to the nature of human language. The fundamental reason for mismatch is that little language analysis is conducted in search. A more realistic approach beyond bag-of-words, referred to as semantic matching, is to conduct deeper query and document analysis to encode text with richer representations and then perform query-document matching with such representations by extracting and utilizing the semantic information. Semantic matching is expected to solve the query document mismatch challenge.
Semantic matching can be extended to phrases or sentences. Indeed, there are initiatives such as the semantic textual similarity evaluation campaign, which go beyond term level matching and aim at capturing the semantic relations between entire phrases as well as those between entire sentences.
The Semantic Matching in Information Retreival (SMIR) workshop brings 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.
TOPICS OF INTEREST:
We intend to have an open discussion on topics related to the general subject of semantic matching in information retrieval and natural language processing. Hence, we welcome contributions that focus on, but are not limited to:
* Semantic representation of natural language
* Semantic similarity between natural language expressions, phrases, sentences and paragraphs
* Semantic parsing of natural language
* Semantic matching in search
* Semantic matching in question answering
* Semantic matching in online advertisement
* Semantic matching in image retrieval
* Semantic matching in entity link
* Semantic matching in online reputation management
* Semantic matching in paraphrasing and textual entailment
* Semantic matching in cross-language retrieval
* Semantic matching in recommendation systems
* Supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques for matching, e.g., including deep learning, kernel methods and so on.
* Semantic matching using sentence/text/document structure
* Semantic matching using link open data
SUBMISSION DETAILS:
Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers related to the aforementioned topics. We invite:
* regular papers (not exceed 8 pages)
Papers should be submitted electronically via the submission site (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=smir2014). Submitted papers should be in the ACM Conference style, and may not exceed 8 pages. All submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. The review is double-blind; please anonymize your submission. All accepted papers will be published in the online proceedings of the workshop.
IMPORTANT DATES:
* Deadline for submissions: May 10, 2014
* Acceptance Notification: May 30, 2014
* Camera-ready papers: June 15, 2014
* Workshop: July 11, 2014
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
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
PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Eneko Agirre, University of the Basque Country
Apoorv Agarwal, Columbia University
Marco Baroni, University of Trento
Roberto Basili, University of Rome
Chris Biemann, University of Darmstadt
Faisal Chowdhury, IBM Watson Research Center
Danilo Croce, University of Rome
Mona Diab, George Washington University
Michael Glass, IBM Watson Research Center
Jiafeng Guo, Chinese Academy of Science
Zhengdong Lv, Noah's Ark Lab, Huawei
Donald Metzler, Google Inc.
Rada Mihalcea, University of Michigan
Siddharth Patwardhan, IBM Watson Research Center
Aliaksei Severyn, University of Trento
Yangqiu Song, UIUC
Quan Wang, Chinese Academy of Science
Ji-rong Wen, Remin University