The 1st International Workshop on Multi-Perspective Consumer Health Search (MPCHS), April 12th, 2016, Montreal, Canada held is held in conjunction with WWW 2016.


Scope and Interests
World Wide Web is increasingly being used by consumers as an aid for health decision making and for self-management of chronic illnesses. General search engines are not effective in addressing complex consumer health queries which do not have a single definitive answer. It is pretty straightforward to get an answer to the query “what are the symptoms of Diabetes” from the search engine. On the other hand, a query such as “can metabolic therapy cure brain cancer” causes considerable frustration for the searcher as he needs to wade through hundreds of search results to obtain a balanced view of the evidence available, both for and against the hypothesis posed in the search query. We use the term “Multi-Perspective Consumer Health Search” (MPCHS) to denote such queries, for which there is “No Single Correct Answer”; Instead multiple and diverse perspectives (which very often are contradictory in nature) are available on the web regarding the queried information.

Multi-Perspective Consumer Health Search (MPCHS) requires (a) subjective data mining of the web for the perspectives pertaining to the query, (b) grading the supporting evidence (if any) for the perspectives, (c) summarizing the perspectives and (d) effective presentation of the perspectives and the supporting evidence to the searcher. These tasks present novel challenges to web search and data mining research community: MPCHS requires mining and synthesis of perspectives from multiple sources, which includes experiential evidence (available from similar patients’ narratives, health related content on social media) and data driven research evidence. Given the increasing use of web by consumers for health and medical decision making, the objective of this workshop is to focus the attention of the WWW research community, on the problem of Multi-Perspective Consumer Health Search.

In particular we will focus on the following topics in MPCHS, but not limited to:
1) Perspective centric Search
2) Supportive evidence mining from web
3) MPCHS applications, case studies and tools
4) Novel Visualization and Presentation of MPCHS results
5) Benchmarking of MPCHS techniques
6) Result Diversification
7) MPCHS User modelling
8) Query augmentation and expansion for MPCHS
9) Theoretical models for MPCHS
10) Semantic search techniques for MPCHS
11) Consumer and medical expert vocabulary reconciliation for MPCHS
12) Creation and Curation of MPCHS query data sets

We solicit full papers of up to 8 pages, short papers of up to 4 pages describing work-in-progress, position papers and case studies of up to 4 pages. Accepted papers will be published in the WWW companion proceedings and will be available from the ACM Digital Library.

Important Dates
Optional Abstract submission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . January 08, 2016
Paper submission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . January 15th, 2016
Notification of Acceptance . . . . . . . . . . . February 2nd, 2016
Final camera-ready paper . . . . . . . . . . . . February 8th, 2016

Workshop Chairs
Shourya Roy, Xerox Research Centre India, Shourya DOT Roy AT Xerox DOT com
Sandya Mannarswamy, Xerox Research centre India, sandya DOT mannarswamy AT Xerox DOT com