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Call for Papers/Participation:
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Cross-lingual Expert Search -
Bridging CLIR and Social Media
http://www.multipla-project.org/cries

* Workshop at CLEF 2010 *
Conference on Multilingual and Multimedia Information
Access Evaluation, http://clef2010.org

* Pilot cross-lingual expert search challenge *


Workshop Description
--------------------
This workshop addresses the problem of multi-lingual expert search in
the context of social media. The main topics are multi-lingual expert
retrieval methods, social media analysis for expert search, selection of
datasets and evaluation of expert search results. We also define a pilot
challenge which will help to identify problems ranging from IPR issues
to result assessment.

We expect the following types of submissions:

* Description of experiments and results on the pilot expert search
challenge

* Scientific papers addressing the following research questions:
* User characterization: the use of multi-lingual evidence of social
media for building expert profiles
* Community analysis: mining of social relationships in collaborative
environments for multi-lingual retrieval scenarios
* User-centric recommender algorithms: development of retrieval and
recommendation algorithms that allow for similarity search and
ranked retrieval of experts in online communities (in contrast to
more common document retrieval tasks).

* Proposals of new social media datasets for cross-lingual expert search

* Analysis of problems and challenges in evaluation of cross-lingual
expert search

Important Dates and Deadlines
-----------------------------
* Workshop *
20.06.2010: Submission deadline for papers
11.07.2010: Notification of acceptance
01.08.2010: Camera ready deadline

* Expert search challenge *
02.05.2010: Submission deadline for results on pilot challenge
30.05.2010: Release of relevance assessments and evaluation results
20.06.2010: Submission deadline for papers
11.07.2010: Notification of acceptance
01.08.2010: Camera ready deadline

Motivation
----------
Online communities generate major economic value and form pivotal parts
of corporate expertise management, marketing, product support, CRM,
product innovation and advertising. In many cases, large-scale online
communities are multi-lingual by nature (e.g. developer networks,
corporate knowledge bases, blogospheres, Web 2.0 portals). Nowadays,
novel solutions are required to deal with both the complexity of
large-scale social networks and the complexity of multi-lingual user
behavior. At the same time, it becomes more and more important to
efficiently identify and connect the right experts for a given task
across locations, organizational units and languages. The key objective
of this workshop is to consider the problem of multi-lingual retrieval
in the novel setting of modern social media leveraging the expertise of
individual users.

Pilot Challenge
---------------
In our pilot challenge we instantiate the problem setting by an expert
finding task, i.e. our goal is to identify the expertise of online
community members and to provide expert suggestions for solving new
problems, answer questions, or help requests in multi-lingual social
media. In many cases, expert users in online communities are
multi-lingual, i.e. they participate in discussions in several
languages. Frequently, the actual expertise of the user is
language-independent, so he/she could provide meaningful assistance to
answer questions and requests stated in any of the known languages. The
combined analysis of multi-lingual user contributions (e.g. answers or
postings from the past) together with mining of their activity (e.g.
interaction with other community members in the past, contact/favorite
lists, etc.) may provide better indications about whether the user has
the necessary expertise for addressing the request irrespective of the
language.

The challenge is based on a dataset that contains questions and answers
from Yahoo! Answers [1] and which is provided by Yahoo! through the
Webscope Program. We identified a subset of this dataset that is
suitable for expert search and selected 60 queries in 4 different
languages, namely English, German, French and Spanish.

We will provide participants in the pilot challenge with the following:

* Description of how to acquire the dataset from Yahoo!

* Preprocessing tool that has the following outputs:
* Restriction of the dataset to the selected categories
* Queries in TREC Topic format
* Questioner/answerer graph

* Evaluation of retrieval results by human assessors

All information about the pilot challenge can be found here:

http://www.multipla-project.org/cries:challenge

Organizing Committee and Contact
--------------------------------
Main contacts:
Philipp Sorg, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
sorg@kit.edu
Sergej Sizov, University of Koblenz
sizov@uni-koblenz.de

Organizing Committee:
Sebastian Blohm, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Philipp Cimiano, Bielefeld University
Antje Schultz, University of Koblenz

Program Committee
-----------------
Eneko Agirre, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Krisztian Balog, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Iryna Gurevych, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Alberto Lavelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Pavel Smrz, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic

[1] http://answers.yahoo.com/