Call for Papers
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SIGIR 2011 Workshop on Entity-Oriented Search (EOS 2011)
July 23, 2011, Beijing

http://research.microsoft.com/sigir-entitysearch/
Contact: eos2011@easychair.org
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WORKSHOP THEME

Many user information needs concern entities: people, organizations,
locations, products, etc. These are better answered by returning specific
objects instead of just any type of documents. Both commercial systems and the
research community are displaying an increased interest in returning
"objects", "entities", or their properties in response to a user's query.
While major search engines are capable of recognizing specific types of
objects (e.g., locations, events, celebrities), true entity search still has a
long way to go.

Entity retrieval is challenging as "objects" unlike documents, are not
directly represented and need to be identified and recognized in the mixed
space of structured and unstructured Web data. While standard document
retrieval methods applied to textual representations of entities
do seem to provide reasonable performance, a big open question remains how
much influence the entity type should have on the ranking algorithms
developed.


WORKSHOP OBJECTIVE

The objective of the workshop is to provide a forum to discuss entity-oriented
search, without restricting to any particular data collection, entity type, or
user task, and to solicit research contributions on topics including entity
mining, entity ranking, query log analysis, or user context. In sum, the
workshop seeks to uncover the next research frontiers in entity-oriented
search.


TOPICS

The workshop especially encourages submissions on the interface of IR and
other disciplines, such as Databases, Semantic Web, Computational Linguistics,
Data Mining, Machine Learning, or Human Computer Interaction. Examples of
topic of interest include (but are not limited to):

* Identification, resolution, and representation of entities (in documents
and in queries)
* Detecting, modeling, and understanding entity-oriented search intents
* Novel search tasks concerning entities (e.g., search by example,
attribute extraction, local/geographical search, etc.)
* Entities in various media: Web, user generated content (social media
sites, weblogs, microblogs, wikis, etc.), Linked Open Data
* Integration of data from multiple sources
* Personalizing entity-oriented search (e.g., using location or personal
social network)
* Test collections and evaluation methodology
* Interfaces for entity-oriented search systems (including result
representation)
* Case studies and applications


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

We invite submissions of regular research papers, position papers, and demo
descriptions, with a maximum 6 pages (using the ACM SIG Proceedings style).
Our recommendation is to not use more than 2-3 pages for demo descriptions,
3-4 pages for position papers, and 5-6 pages for research papers, but there
are no particular restrictions on that.

All submissions will be reviewed by at least two program committee members,
and will be assessed based on their novelty, technical quality, potential
impact, and clarity of writing. Selection uses a standard double blind
procedure.

All accepted papers will be published as part of the SIGIR workshop
proceedings (with ISBN number), and will be available online from the workshop
website. The organizers will discuss the opportunity of editing a special
issue with the IR journal or IP&M, and authors of the best quality submissions
will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers (subject to the
overall standard of submissions).

The best paper/presentation will receive an award sponsored by Yandex.

WORKSHOP FORMAT

Based on reviewers' comments, a subset of papers we be selected for oral
presentation and the rest of authors will be asked to present posters. We plan
to organize a boaster session for posters authors, where they will be given
the opportunity to briefly present their work (in 3-5 minutes) to all workshop
participants. The workshop will also feature two invited speakers.


IMPORTANT DATES

* Submissions due: June 10, 2011
* Notification of acceptance: June 25, 2011
* Camera-ready submission: July 1, 2011 (provisional, awaiting confirmation)
* Workshop date: July 28, 2011


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

* Krisztian Balog (NTNU, Norway)
* Arjen P. de Vries (CWI/TU Delft, The Netherlands)
* Pavel Serdyukov (Yandex, Russia)
* Ji-Rong Wen (Microsoft Research Asia, China)


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

* Ioannis (Yanni) Antonellis (Nextag, USA)
* Wojciech M. Barczynski (SAP Research, Germany)
* Indrajit Bhattacharya (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India)
* Roi Blanco (Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain)
* Paul Buitelaar (DERI - National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland)
* Wray Buntine (NICTA Canberra, Australia)
* Jamie Callan (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
* Nick Craswell (Microsoft, USA)
* Gianluca Demartini (L3S, Germany)
* Lise Getoor (University Maryland, USA)
* Harry Halpin (University of Edinburgh, UK)
* Michiel Hildebrand (VU University Amsterdam, NL)
* Prateek Jain (Wright State University, USA)
* Arnd Christian König (Microsoft, USA)
* Nick Koudas (University of Toronto, Canada)
* David Lewis (Independent, USA)
* Jisheng Liang (Microsoft Bing, USA)
* Peter Mika (Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain)
* Marie Francine Moens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
* Iadh Ounis (Univsersity of Glasgow, UK)
* Ralf Schenkel (Max-Planck Insitute for Computer Science, Germany)
* Shuming Shi (Microsoft Research Asia, China)
* Ian Soboroff (NIST, USA)
* Fabian Suchanek (INRIA, France)
* Duc Thanh Tran (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
* Wouter Weerkamp (University of Amsterdam, NL)
* Jianhan Zhu (Open University, UK)