Call for papers and posters

Workshop on Accessible Search Systems

in conjunction with the 33rd Annual ACM SIGIR Conference
Geneva, Switzerland, 23 July 2010
http://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/~ir/accessiblesearch

AIMS

Current search systems are not adequate for individuals with specific
needs: children, older adults, people with visual or motor impairments,
and people with intellectual disabilities or low literacy. Search
services are typically created for average users (young or middle-aged
adults without physical or mental disabilities) and information
retrieval methods are based on their perception of relevance as well.
The workshop will be the first to raise the discussion on how to make
search engines accessible for different types of users, including
those with problems in reading, writing or comprehension of complex
content. Search accessibility means that people whose abilities are
considerably different from those that average users have will be able
to successfully use search systems.

The objective of the workshop is to provide a forum and initiate
collaborations between academics and industrial practitioners interested
in making search more usable for users in general and for users with
specific needs in particular. We encourage presentation and participation
from researchers working at the intersection of information retrieval,
natural language processing, human-computer interaction, ambient
intelligence and related areas.

INVITED SPEAKERS

The organizers are pleased to announce two invited speakers who will
present at the workshop:

Dr. T.V. Raman, Senior Research Scientist at Google Labs. Dr. Raman
leads the project "Google Accessible Search", helping users with
impairments to find accessible Web content.

Dr. Allison Druin, Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at
the University of Maryland. Since 1998, Dr. Druin has led an
interdisciplinary research teams looking for ways to improve
information access for children and understand their search behavior.

PAPERS AND POSTERS

The conference language is English. The workshop will be a mix of oral
presentations for long papers (maximum of 8 pages), a session for
posters (maximum of 2 pages) and a panel discussion. All submissions
will be reviewed by at least two program committee members. Workshop
proceedings will be available at the workshop.

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Please, submit papers in pdf-format, using the ACM SIG Proceedings style
(http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html) using EasyChair:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=accessiblesearch2010

IMPORTANT DATES

23 May: Paper submission deadline
13 June: Notification of acceptance
23 June: Camera-ready papers due (provisional, awaiting confirmation
from the SIGIR conference chairs)
23 July: Workshop in Geneva, Switzerland

TOPICS

The workshop welcomes contributions on any issue concerning accessible
search, for instance:

* Understanding of search behavior of users with specific needs
* Understanding of relevance criteria of users with specific needs
* Understanding the effects of domain expertise, age, user experience
and cognitive abilities on search goals and results evaluation
* Non-topical aspects of relevance: text style, readability,
appropriateness of language (harassment and explicit content
detection)
* Development of test collections for evaluation of accessible search
systems
* Collaborative search techniques for assisting users with specific
needs (e.g. parents helping children)
* Potential of search personalization techniques to satisfy users with
specific needs
* Search interfaces and result representation for people with specific
needs
* Using assistive technologies for interaction with search systems,
e.g. speech recognition or eye tracking software for querying and
browsing.