FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

NAACL-HLT 2010 Workshop on Semantic Search (SemanticSearch 2010)
June 5 or 6, Los Angeles, CA

Workshop Website: http://www.semsearch.info/

Submission Deadline: March 1, 2010


Information retrieval (IR) research has been actively driven by the challenging information
overload problem and many successful general-purpose commercial search engines. While
the popularity of the largest search engines are a confirmation of the success and utility
of IR, the identification, representation, and use of the often-complex semantics behind
user queries has not yet been fully explored.

In this workshop we target methods that exploit semantics in search-related tasks. One of
the major obstacles in bridging the gap between IR and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
is how to retain the flexibility and precision of working with text at the lexical level
while gaining the greater descriptive precision that NLP provides. We encourage contributions
on automatic analysis of queries and documents in order to encode and exploit information
beyond surface-level keywords: named entities, relations, semantic roles, etc.

This workshop is meant to accelerate the pace of progress in semantic search techniques by
connecting IR and NLP, bridging semantic analysis and search methodologies, and exploring
the potentials of search utilizing semantics. We also focus on forming an interest group
from different areas of research, exploring collaboration opportunities, providing deeper
insight into bringing semantics into search, and provoking or encouraging discussions on
all of its potential.

We invite submissions on (but not limited to) the following topics:
- Query Parsing and Semantic Tagging
- Query Suggestion and Recommendation
- Query Expansion
- Query Intention Detection
- Web Query Analysis and Mining
- Semantic Annotation and Indexing
- Language Modeling for Information Retrieval
- Information Extraction and Summarization for Indexing and Search
- Question Answering
- Search Reranking Integrating Semantic Features
- Search Relevance Evaluation using Semantic Technology
- Topic Modeling and Semantic Tagging


IMPORTANT DATES

Mar 1, 2010 Submissions due
Mar 30, 2010 Notification of acceptance
Apr 12, 2010 Camera-ready due
Jun 5 or 6, 2010 Workshop date


WORKSHOP WEBSITE

http://www.semsearch.info/


ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Submissions should follow the two-column format of NAACL HLT 2010 proceedings
without exceeding eight (8) pages of content plus one extra page for references.
We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word style
files tailored for this year's conference, which are available on the conference
website under http://naaclhlt2010.isi.edu/authors.html. Submissions must conform
to the official style guidelines, and must be electronic in PDF.

As the reviewing will be blind, the paper must not include the authors' names and
affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g.,
"We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." must be avoided. Instead, use citations
such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." Papers that do not conform to
these requirements will be rejected without review. In addition, please do not post
your submissions on the web until after the review process is complete.

All contributions should be submitted via the NAACL online submission system:
https://www.softconf.com/naaclhlt2010/semanticsearch/


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Donghui Feng, AT&T Interactive, donghui.feng@att.com
Jamie Callan, Carnegie Mellon University, callan@cmu.edu
Eduard Hovy, USC/ISI, hovy@isi.edu
Marius Pasca, Google Inc., mars@google.com


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Labs-Research
Raman Chandrasekar, Microsoft Research
Jennifer Chu-Carroll, IBM Research
Patrick Haffner, AT&T Labs-Research
Nikesh Garera, Kosmix
Ralph Grishman, New York University
Liang Huang, USC/ISI
Zornitsa Kozareva, USC/ISI
Hang Li, Microsoft Research Asia
Dekang Lin, Google Inc.
Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore
Ellen Riloff, University of Utah
Dan Roth, UIUC
James Shanahan, AT&T Interactive
Young-In Song, Microsoft Research Asia
Qin Wang, AT&T Interactive
Kenji Yamada, AT&T Interactive
Remi Zajac, AT&T Interactive


CONTACT INFORMATION

Donghui Feng
AT&T Interactive
611 N. Brand Blvd, 5th Flr.
Glendale, CA, 91202, USA
Email: donghui.feng@att.com