WSCD 2013 Call for Refereed Papers
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The WSCD 2013 chairs invite you to submit articles to the Third
Workshop on Web Search Click Data. This workshop will be held in
conjunction with WSDM 2013 on February 4, 2013, Rome, Italy.

--A dataset will be provided to all participants.

Web search click data has caught the interest of a growing community
of professional during the last five years. It provides a snapshot of
the typical information access patterns of the user population, unlike
a group of relevance judges or the tags provided on collaborative
sites. Issued queries and clicked document records have the potential
to give an accurate view of millions of people's daily interests, how
these interests evolve, how they are related, etc. Yet this
information is not easily extracted because in spite of its abundance
it is sparse, most queries are repeated only a few time if at all, and
the clicktrhough rate cannot be interpreted as document relevance
directly. Moreover, user clicks are strongly biased by the search
engine ranking, which mean that many documents are never seen in spite
of being relevant.

Of particular interest is the relation between log data and the user
decision process that generated it. A user interacting with a search
engine might at any point decide to click on a new link, request a new
page of results, reformulate his query, switch search engine or end
the session. Understanding how a sequence of actions relates to the
user satisfaction is key to improve the experience and the popularity
of the search engine. This applies to web search in general but also
to most verticals like "local search" and to newer research areas like
"diversity" where the question is how to introduce diversity in
document ranking or "personalization" where the goal is to adapt the
search results to take into account what is known from the user who
issued the query.

In this workshop, we will attempt to address these issues but we will
also explore novel applications and use of these data for enhancing
the user search experience.

Data Set
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Research on the incorporation of click data into information retrieval
systems, and for understanding user search, has been hampered by a
lack of shared datasets. This workshop provides a common click
dataset and a forum for presenting new results and analysis in the
area. The dataset includes user sessions extracted from Yandex logs,
with queries, URL rankings, clicks and also search engine switching
actions. To allay privacy concerns the user data is fully
anonymized. So, only meaningless numeric IDs of users, queries,
sessions, and URLs are released.

In contrast to last year WSCD workshop, the data does not contain
editorial relevance judgments.

Challenge
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A challenge is running in parallel to this workshop. The evaluation
will be purely data-driven and will be focused on predicting user
search engines switches for a sample of held-out sessions. More
details will be soon available at http://switchdetect.yandex.ru/en

!!! Note that it is not obligatory neither to participate in the
Challenge, nor to use the provided dataset to submit a paper to
the workshop. WSCD welcomes papers using any search logs available
to the authors. !!!

Paper Format
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Submissions should present original results and new ideas. They must
report original research not accepted or under submission to any
journal or conference with public proceedings (previous submissions in
informal workshops or as posters are allowed, but must be indicated).
Submissions must be formatted according to ACM guidelines and style
files http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates and
can be up to 8 pages in length, including diagrams, references and
appendices if any. A submitted paper must be self-contained.
Submissions shorter than 8 pages are also encouraged.

All papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three reviewers from an
International Program Committee; promising papers will then be
discussed in a meeting of PC chairs, where the final selections will
be made. Accepted papers will appear online on the workshop website and a jointly authored report will be submitted to SIGIR Forum.

Paper Submissions
-----------------

Papers must be submitted in PDF format to the paper submission Web
site (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wscd2013). PDF files
must have all non-standard fonts embedded. After upload, please check
the copy stored on the site. Submission that do not view or print
properly may be rejected without a chance to rectify the problem.
Please contact wscd2013@yahoo.com for any questions.

Important Dates for Paper Submissions

Papers due: December 3, 2012
Notification of Acceptance: January 10, 2013
Camera-Ready: January 17, 2013
Workshop: February 12, 2013

Important Dates for the Challenge

Start of Challenge: October 23, 2012
End of Challenge: December 22, 2012 at 13:00, Moscow time

The workshop website can be found at
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nickcr/wscd2013.