CFP CIKM'15 Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations ESAIR'15: Deadline July 2nd

Apologies for cross-posting


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8th Workshop on

Exploiting Semantic Annotations for Information Retrieval (ESAIR’15)

in conjunction with CIKM 2015


CALL FOR PAPERS


https://www.esair.org/

23 October 2015, Melbourne, Australia

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IMPORTANT DATES

Regular paper submission: 2 July 2015

Special track for re-submissions of CIKM papers: 8 July 2015

Notification of acceptance: 23 July 2015

Camera ready: 7 August 2015

Workshop: 23 October 2015


OVERVIEW

The amount of structured content published on the Web has been growing 
rapidly, making it possible to address increasingly complex information 
access tasks. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of large scale 
human-curated knowledge bases as well as a growing array of techniques 
that identify or extract information automatically from unstructured and 
semi-structured sources. Yet, the potential of rich document annotations 
cannot be fully realized when information needs are expressed only by 
short keyword queries. One main open research challenge, and 
opportunity, remains on the users’ side: how to encourage and allow 
searchers to articulate longer, semantically enriched queries? And, 
assuming users’ would be willing to provide additional details, what 
type of annotations would benefit retrieval systems the most?


The ESAIR workshop series aims to advance the general research agenda on 
this core problem. The eighth edition of ESAIR, with a renewed set of 
organizers, sets its focus on

applications. We invite presentations of prototype systems in a 
dedicated “Annotations in Action” demo track, in addition to the regular 
research and position paper contributions. The desired result of the 
workshop is a roadmap and research agenda that guides academic efforts 
and aligns them with industrial directions and developments.


SCOPE AND TOPICS

The Workshop will bring together researchers working with semantic 
annotations, its use cases, its sources, its users, and its use in DB, 
IR, KM, or Web research, and work together on a range of open questions:


By semantic annotations we refer to linguistic annotations (such as 
named entities, semantic classes or roles, etc.) as well as user 
annotations (such as micro-formats, RDF, tags, etc.). ESAIR’15 will 
continue, with a new generation of organizers, on the path set by the 
previous edition(s) of the workshop: clarifying the exact role of 
semantic annotations in supporting complex search tasks.


Annotations come in a variety of flavors (named entities, temporal 
information, geo-positional markers, semantic roles, sentiment, etc.) 
and there is a growing repertoire of tools and techniques available for 
extracting these annotations automatically from text. The question then 
presents itself: what, if anything, is missing? We seek to answer this 
question by focusing on applications that are rooted in specific, 
real-world use cases; we also provide a number of such use cases, as 
motivational examples.


Topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to:

  *

    Applications and use cases

      o

        What are use cases that make obvious the need for semantic
        annotation of information?

      o

        What tasks cannot be solved by traditional (bag-of-words)
        retrieval approaches?

  *

    Annotations

      o

        What types of annotation are available and what is missing?

      o

        Are there crucial differences between human and
        machine-generated annotations?

      o

        How should we deal with the uncertainty of annotations?

  *

    User interfaces and interaction

      o

        How to aid users in articulating powerful queries (beyond a few
        keywords)?

      o

        How to present results and interact with users in an
        intelligible way?

  *

    Evaluation

      o

        How to evaluate semantic annotations (component-based vs.
        end-to-end)?


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

All submissions must be formatted according to the ACM SIG proceedings 
format (option 2).

  *

    Regular research papers (4+ pages, with an expected mean of 6 pages)

  *

    Position papers (2+1 pages)

  *

    Demo papers (4+ pages)


What's a 2+1 page paper?  We like short and focused contributions 
highlighting your main point, claim, observation, finding, experiment, 
project, etc, (roughly 2 pages of mainly text) but we also like clear 
tables, graphs, and full citations (that's the "+1" page). So your 
submission can up three pages, as long as max. 2 of them are narrative text.


We also invite researchers and practitioners to present their innovative 
prototypes in a dedicated “Annotation in Action” demo track at the 
workshop. Demo submissions must be based on an implemented system that 
pursues one or more aspects relevant to the interest areas of the 
workshop. A Best Demonstration Award will be presented to the authors of 
the most outstanding demo at the workshop.


The reviewing process is single-blind, so submissions do not need to be 
anonymized. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to 
present their work at the workshop.


Please submit your paper through the submission website:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=esair15


The deadline for regular papers is July 2nd. The workshop also offers a 
track for authors of papers that were not successful at the main 
conference for their work to be considered for presentation at the 
workshop; the deadline for these contributions is July 8. In this case, 
authors are required to attach the reviews for their paper along with 
the paper so as to facilitate the decision process.


ORGANIZERS

Krisztian Balog, University of Stavanger, Norway

Jeffrey Dalton, Google Research, USA

Antoine Doucet, University of La Rochelle, L3i Laboratory, France

Yusra Ibrahim, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany