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WSCD 2014 CALL FOR REFEREED PAPERS
____________________________________


The WSCD 2014 chairs invite you to submit articles to the Fourth
Workshop in the series. This workshop will be held in conjunction with
WSDM 2014 on February 28, 2013, New York City, USA.

This year's workshop focuses on log-based methods, for application in
search systems and recommender systems, that tailor results for the
current user. The logs can be used to uncover characteristics, patterns
and preferences in users and cohorts of users. Logs can also be used to
train the personalized search/recommender system. The goal is to improve
results by showing different results to different users.

In one application, a search system might detect a user's current
interest in rock music, so reorder the results for the query 'Chicago'
to promote the band above the city. In another application, a news
recommender system might use a contextual bandit approach to learn from
click logs and personalize news article recommendation.

The workshop is a forum for discussion of current work and problems in
the area. For this reason we solicit position papers:

- Specific models for log-based personalization
- Data mining methods for identifying and characterizing interests of
users in logged data
- Specific application(s) of log-based personalization. How useful is
it? What works? What doesn't?
- Insights into personalization evidence and features derived from
logs. For example via demographics, topical interests or memorizing
specific past actions
- Does log-based personalization narrow options into a filter bubble?
- Or, does log-based personalization broaden people's options like on
Amazon
- What machine learning problems arise in training log-based
personalized models
- What IR evaluation problems arise in testing log-based models
- What datasets are available, or should be available, for studying
log-based personalization

The workshop website can be found at
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nickcr/wscd2014].


1 Important Dates
=================

Short papers due: 23rd December 2013
Notification of Acceptance: 10th January 2014
Camera-Ready: 17th January 2014
Workshop: February 28, 2014


2 Paper Format and Submissions
==============================

We accept short position and "late breaking results" papers of 2-4
pages, formatted according to ACM guidelines and style files
[http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates]. They
will be refereed but with the goal of an inclusive discussion of the
research area and future directions at the workshop.

Papers must be submitted in PDF format to the paper submission Web
site ([http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wscd2014]). 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 wscd2014@easychair.org for any questions.


3 WSCD Series Overview
======================

The workshop on Log-Based Personalization is WSCD2014, the fourth
workshop on Web Search Click Data. It follows WSCD2009, WSCD2012 and
WSCD2013. The workshop series is a forum for new research relating to
Web search usage logs and for discussing desirable properties of
publicly released search log datasets. For a summary of datasets used
and discussed at the workshop, see the datasets summary page.

The previous workshop websites can be found at:
- [https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nickcr/wscd09]
- [https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nickcr/wscd2012]
- [https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nickcr/wscd2013]

Research relating to search logs has been hampered by the limited
availability of click datasets. This workshop comes with a new click
dataset based on click logs and an accompanying challenge.

For participants in the workshop, participating in the challenge is
optional, and authors are invited to submit papers using this or other
datasets.


4 The Dataset and Challenge (participation is *optional*!)
==========================================================

This year's challenge is the Personalized Web Search Challenge, which
uses anonymized data from Yandex and is hosted by Kaggle. Participants
rerank URLs on a SERP according to the personal preferences of
users. This may involve long-term (user history based) and short-term
(session based) user context. The dataset includes anonymized user
ids, queries, query terms, urls, url domains and clicks. The
evaluation rewards a reranking if the promoted URL had a long-dwell
click by the current user.

More information can be found on the challenge website at
[https://www.kaggle.com/c/yandex-personalized-web-search-challenge].

Challenge winners are encouraged to write a report on their
participation and present their results at the workshop. The challenge
ends Friday, January 10, 2014.


5 Workshop Organizers
=====================

- Pavel Serdyukov, Yandex
- Georges Dupret, Yahoo!
- Nick Craswell, Microsoft
- Additional challenge organizer: Eugene Kharitonov, Yandex