1st CfP: Entity-oriented and Semantic Search Workshop (JIWES) at SIGIR 2012

***apologies for cross postings***


					1st Call for Papers
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				1st Joint Intl. Workshop on

 		Entity-oriented and Semantic Search (JIWES)

			August 16th, Portland, Oregon, USA
			Workshop at SIGIR 2012 Conference
			http://km.aifb.kit.edu/ws/jiwes2012/

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WORKSHOP THEME

The workshop encompasses various tasks and approaches that go beyond the traditional bag-of-words paradigm and incorporate an explicit representation of the semantics behind information needs and relevant content. This kind of semantic search, based on concepts, entities and relations between them, has attracted attention both from industry and from the research community. The workshop aims to bring people from different communities (IR, SW, DB, NLP, HCI, etc.) and backgrounds (both academics and industry practitioners) together, to identify and discuss emerging trends, tasks and challenges. This joint workshop is a sequel of the Entity-oriented and Semantic Search Workshop series held at different conferences in previous years.



TOPICS

The workshop aims to gather all works that discuss entities along three dimensions: tasks, data and interaction. Tasks include entity search  (search for entities or documents representing entities), relation search (search entities related to an entity), as well as more complex tasks (involving multiple entities---spatiotemporal relations inclusive---, involving multiple queries). In the data dimension, we consider (web/enterprise) documents (possibly annotated with entities/relations), LOD, as well as user generated content. The interaction dimension gives room for research into user interaction with entities, also considering how to display results, as well as whether to aggregate over multiple entities to construct entity profiles.

The workshop especially encourages submissions on the interface of IR and other disciplines, such as the Semantic Web, Databases, Computational Linguistics, Data Mining, Machine Learning, or Human Computer Interaction. Examples of topic of interest include (but are not limited to):

Data acquisition and processing (crawling, storage, and indexing)
Dealing with noisy, vague and incomplete data
Integration of data from multiple sources
Identification, resolution, and representation of entities (in documents and in queries)
Retrieval and ranking
Semantic query modeling (detecting, modeling, and understanding search intents)
Novel entity-oriented information access tasks
Interaction paradigms (natural language, keyword-based, and hybrid interfaces) and result representation
Test collections and evaluation methodology
Case studies and applications

We particularly encourage formal evaluation of approaches using previously established evaluation benchmarks.


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

We invite submissions of regular research papers (max. 6 pages), position papers (max. 3 pages), and demo descriptions (max. 3 pages). All submissions will be reviewed by at least two program committee members, and will be assessed based on their novelty, technical quality, potential impact, and clarity of writing. Selection uses a standard double blind procedure. All accepted papers will be published as part of the SIGIR workshop proceedings and will be indexed in the ACM Digital Library. 

Please, submit in PDF format to:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jiwes2012

Using the ACM SIG Proceedings style (for LaTeX, use the "Option 2" style):
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates

BEST CONTRIBUTION AWARD

The best contribution (paper/presentation) will receive an award sponsored by Yandex.


WORKSHOP FORMAT
The workshop will comprise of invited talks, oral presentations, and open-forum discussions.


IMPORTANT DATES
Submissions due: July 2, 2012
Notification of acceptance: July 23, 2012
Camera-ready submission: Aug 1, 2012
Workshop date: Aug 16, 2012



ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Krisztian Balog (NTNU, Norway)
David Carmel (IBM Research Haifa)
Arjen P. de Vries (CWI/TU Delft, The Netherlands)
Daniel M. Herzig (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
Peter Mika (Yahoo! Research, Barcelona)
Haggai Roitman (IBM Research Haifa)
Ralf Schenkel (Saarland University/MPII)
Pavel Serdyukov (Yandex, Russia)
Thanh Tran Duc (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
TBA

CONTACT
jiwes.workshop@gmail.com







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Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB)

Daniel M. Herzig

Research Associate 

Institut AIFB
Kollegiengebäude am Ehrenhof (Geb. 11.40)
Englerstr. 11
D-76131 Karlsruhe
Germany

Phone.:+49 (721) 608 46108
Fax: +49 (721) 608 46580

herzig@kit.edu
www.aifb.kit.edu/web/Daniel_M._Herzig/en

KIT - University of the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg and National Laboratory of the Helmholtz Association