Call for Papers
Sixth Workshop on
Exploiting Semantic Annotations for Information Retrieval (ESAIR'13)
CIKM 2013, October 28, San Francisco
Submissions due: June 21
Web languages, micro-formats and linked data, user tagging and annotation,
and emerging robust NLP tools. These meaningful, semantic, annotations hold
the promise to significantly enhance information access, by increasing 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. To complicate matters, standard
text search excels at shallow information needs expressed by short keyword
queries, and here semantic annotation contributes very little, if anything.
The main questions for the workshop are: How to make use of the currently
emerging knowledge resources (such as DBpedia, Freebase) as underlying
semantic model giving access to an unprecedented scope and detail of factual
information? How to include annotations beyond the topical dimension (think
of reading level, prerequisite level, content credibility, transaction
trustworthiness, freshness, genre, sentiment, etc) that contain vital cues
for matching the specific needs and profile of the searcher at hand?
* Many Open Questions
The Workshop will bring together researchers working with semantic
annotations, its use cases, its sources (authoring to NLP tools), its users,
and its use in DB, IR, KM, or Web research, and work together on a range of
open questions:
Application/Use Case: 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 is keeping searchers from
exploring these powerful search request? What impact has the web of data
with more and more information in preprocessed form?
- Annotations: What types of annotation are available? Are there crucial
differences between author-, software-, user-, and machine-generated
annotations? Do we annotate types/classes/categories ("person") or instances
("Albert Einstein")? How similar or different are linked data and annotated
text? What are the limitations of the current annotations schemes, and how
to overcome them?
- Rich Context: Do we annotate text? Or also search requests and
interactions, and their broader context? Besides personalization and
geo-positional information, mobiles have a wide and growing range of
locational, mechanical and even biometrical sensor data available to them.
Can kick-start the query by inferring task and situational context in the
mobile use case?
- (Un)certainty: How should we interpret the annotations? Can we reliably
link textual annotations to known entity catalogs? Can expect a messy world
to be captured in a clean set of meaningful categories? Or is all
information fundamentally uncertain and only partly known? How can we
fruitfully combine information retrieval and semantic web approaches?
These and other related questions will be discussed at this open format
workshop -- the aim is to provide paths for further research to change the
way we understand information access today!
* We Need Your Help!
Help us shape the future of information access by increasing the depth of
analysis of today's systems:
- Submit a short 2+1-page research or position paper explaining your key
wishes or key points,
- and take actively part in the discussion at the Workshop.
What's a 2+1 page paper? We like short and focused contributions
highlighting your main point, claim, observation, finding, experiment,
project, etc, (roughly 2 pages of mainly text) but we also like clear
tables, graphs, and full citations (that's the "+1" page). So your
submission can up three pages, as long as max. 2 of them are narrative text.
The deadline is Friday June 21, 2013, further submission details are on
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kamps/esair13/
We are looking forward to a productive, stimulating and fruitful workshop
day in the tradition of previous ESAIR workshops -- come join the
discussion!
Paul N. Bennett, Microsoft Research
Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Google
Jaap Kamps, University of Amsterdam
Jussi Karlgren, Gavagai Stockholm
