Information Processing & Management

Special Issue on Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval

Call for Papers

Deadline: October 30th 2008

Despite the growing number and complexity of annotated corpora, and
despite the potential impact that these may have in information
retrieval (IR) tasks, annotations have not yet made a significant
impact in IR research or applications.

In recent years there has been a lot of discussion about semantic
annotations of document collections. There are many forms of
annotations and many techniques that identify or extract them.
Named-entity extraction, semantic classes, microformats, RDF, and user
tags are examples of such annotations. As natural language processing
(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.

The ESAIR'08 (http://www.yr-bcn.es/esair08) workshop brought together
researchers and practitioners trying to use annotations for search in
diverse fields (from databases to linguistics, multimedia retrieval,
retrieval, semantic web...). It was obvious that there was a wealth of
interesting research problems and applications, and increased interest
from the community, and it seemed important to continue this
multi-disciplinary discussion through a journal special issue and
future workshops (such as ESAIR'09, http://www.yr-bcn.es/esair09).

We invite original papers addressing novel information processing and
data management techniques involving semantic annotations and
information retrieval. Contributions related to algorithms,
applications, tools, and practical aspects are welcome.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Semantic Web
- Semantic search
- Collaborative tagging and annotation
- Applications and tools
- Annotation and evaluation
- Classification and clustering
- Text mining
- Question answering
- User interfaces and visualization
- Time
- GIS
- Exploratory search
- Summarization

Submission Guidelines

The deadline for submissions is October 30th 2008. All contributions
should be submitted through the electronic submission system of
Information Processing & Management, following the journal guidelines
for authors found at:

http://www.elsevier.com/locate/infoproman

Please upload your document to be considered for the Semantic
Annotations in Information Retrieval Special Issue at
http://ees.elsevier.com/ipm/ and choose `Special Issue: SAIR' as the
Article Type. Include an abstract, three to five keywords, and the
corresponding author's e-mail address.

Guest Editors

Omar Alonso (A9.com) - oalonso@a9.com
Hugo Zaragoza (Yahoo! Research) - hugoz@yahoo-inc.com

If you have any questions regarding the special issue, such as whether
your research would be appropriate for this issue, feel free to
contact the guest editors.