Third Workshop on
Exploiting Semantic Annotations for Information Retrieval (ESAIR 2010)

CIKM 2010, October 30, Toronto
http://www.sics.se/events/esair2010/

Submissions due: June 30

Call for Papers

There is an increasing amount of structure on the Web as a result of
modern Web languages, user tagging and annotation, and emerging robust
NLP tools. These meaningful, semantic, annotations hold the promise
to significantly enhance information access, by enhancing the depth of
analysis of today's systems. Currently, we have only started
exploring the possibilities and only begin to understand how these
valuable semantic cues can be put to fruitful use.

Unleashing the potential of semantic annotations requires us to
transcend earlier technologies, by combining the insights of natural
language processing (NLP) to go beyond bags of words, the insights of
databases (DB) to use structure efficiently even when aggregating over
millions of records, the insights of information retrieval (IR) in
effective goal-directed search and evaluation, and the insights of
knowledge management (KM) to get grips on the greater whole.

The Workshop will bring together researchers from these different
disciplines and identify the natural use cases, the barriers to
success, and work on ways of addressing them:

Use Cases: Are we looking at the right applications?
- What are use cases that make obvious the need for semantic
annotation of information?
- What tasks cannot be solved by document retrieval using the
traditional bag-of-words?
- What are the prerequisites of successful application?

Annotations: Are we using the right types of data and annotation?
- Are there crucial differences between author, software, user, and
machine generated annotations?
- Named entities, temporal expressions on the one hand and sentiment
and hedging on the other are examples of analyses beyond topic that
have moved to profitable application.
- Are there other types of annotations that are within our grasp?

Searcher/Queries: Are we considering the right search requests?
- With shallow 2.4 word navigational queries, how much benefit is in
semantic annotations?
- What expressive power is hidden in the semantic annotation?
- What is keeping searchers from exploring these powerful search
request?

Result Aggregation: Are we using the right types of results?
- Whereas IR focuses almost exclusively at finding individual chunks
of information, DB naturally focuses on results that combine
information and produce aggregated results (think of OLAP queries),
and KM naturally deal with the whole information space.
- How can we fruitfully combine these strengths?

Grand Challenge: Is there a grand challenge for the application of
semantic annotation?

Help us shape the future of information access by increasing the depth
of analysis of today's systems:

- Submit a short 2-page poster or position paper explaining your key
wishes or key points,
- and take actively part in the discussion at the Workshop.

The deadline is Wednesday June 30, 2010, further submission details are
on http://www.sics.se/events/esair2010/

Jaap Kamps, University of Amsterdam
Jussi Karlgren, SICS
Ralf Schenkel, MPI/Saarland University