ESAIR 2009: LAST CALL FOR PAPERS

LAST CALL FOR PAPERS:
ESAIR 2009 : Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval
http://barcelona.research.yahoo.net/esair09



ESAIR'2009 is an ACM Workshop held in conjunction with WSDM 2009<http://www.wsdm2009.org/> on February 9th, in Barcelona.

After the success of the first ESAIR (ESAIR'08<http://www.yr-bcn.es/esair08>), we've decided to organize this workshop one more year. The goal of this workshop is to create a forum for researchers interested in the use of semantic annotations for information retrieval. By semantic annotations we refer to linguistic annotations (such as named entities, semantic classes, etc.) as well as user annotations such as microformats, RDF, tags, etc. The aim of this workshop is not semantic annotation itself, but rather the applications of semantic annotation to information retrieval tasks such as ad-hoc retrieval, classification, browsing, textual mining, summarization, question answering, etc.

In the recent years there has been a lot of discussion about semantic annotation of documents. There are many forms of annotations and many techniques that identify or extract them. As NLP tagging techniques mature, more and more annotations can be automatically extracted from free text. In particular, techniques have been developed to ground named entities in terms of geo-codes, ISO time codes, Gene Ontology ids, etc. Furthermore, the number of collections which explicitly identify entities is growing fast with Web 2.0 and Semantic Web initiatives.

Despite the growing number and complexity of annotations, and despite the potential impact that these may have in information retrieval tasks, annotations have not yet made a significant impact in Information Retrieval research or applications. Further research is needed before we can unleash the potential of annotations!

Workshop Information

ESAIR09 is an ACM workshop held in conjuction with the Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2009<http://www.wsdm2009.org/>). ESAIR will be a one-day workshop held on February 9. It will alternate short paper presentations, open discussions and demos. Paper and demos presented will be peer-reviewed.

Accepted workshop papers will also be published in the WSDM electronic proceedings, and indexed in the ACM digital library.

The registration site <http://www.regonline.com/WSDM2009> is now open, early registration ends January 7, 2009.

Submissions

Submissions should be in the PDF format be sent by email to oralonso_at_gmail.com and hugoz_at_yahoo-inc.com with the title "ESAIR09 paper/demo submission". Other than this there are no rules with respect to style or length limit. Submissions do not need to be anonymous. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

Paper submissions: we encourage short paper submissions describing novel work which may not be yet fully evaluated (i.e. somewhere between a poster and a conference paper).

Demo submissions: please send a (PDF) description of the demo with many snapshots (or a url if the demo is public).

Important Dates

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Submission date: December 5, 2008
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Notifications: January 4, 2009 (NOTE! This has changed!)
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Camera Ready: January 6, 2009 (NOTE! This has changed!)
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Workshop: February 9, 2009

Organizers

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Omar Alonso, A9.com (USA)
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Hugo Zaragoza, Yahoo! Research Barcelona (Spain)

Program Committee

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Michael Gertz
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Peter Mika
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Arjen P. de Vries
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Peter Jackson
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Aaron Kaplan