[Asis-l] CFP Seven SIGIR’14 Workshops on emerging areas in IR

[Jaap Kamps]

The workshop program of the

    SIGIR’14: 37th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference,
    Gold Coast, Australia, 6-11 July, 2014
    <http://sigir.org/sigir2014/>

will host seven attractive workshops covering novel ideas and emerging 
areas in IR:


* ERD’14: Entity Recognition and Disambiguation Challenge

http://web-ngram.research.microsoft.com/ERD2014/

The Entity Recognition and Disambiguation Workshop will be organized as 
a challenge, where participants submit working systems that identify the 
entities mentioned in text. The challenge will have two tracks, focusing 
on long and short texts. All submissions will be evaluated on shared 
datasets; part of the data will be withheld, to be used for the final 
evaluation of all submitted systems to determine the winners. Each 
participating team will be offered a spot at the workshop to present 
their system.

David Carmel, Yahoo! Research
Ming-Wei Chang, Microsoft Research
Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Google
Bo-June (Paul) Hsu, Microsoft Research
Kuansan Wang, Microsoft Research


* GEAR’14: Gathering Efficient Assessments of Relevance Workshop

https://sites.google.com/site/sigirgear/

Evaluation is a fundamental part of Information Retrieval, and in the 
conventional Cranfield evaluation paradigm, sets of relevance 
assessments are a fundamental part of test collections. In this 
workshop, we wish to revisit how relevance assessments can be 
efficiently created. Potential themes include methods for generating 
assessments, the process of assessment, effort involved in assessing 
different materials, exploration of the concept of relevance etc. A 
discussion and exploration of this issue will be facilitated through the 
presentation of results based papers and position papers on the topic, 
as well as a group design activity.

Martin Halvey, Glasgow Caledonian University
Robert Villa, University of Sheffield
Paul Clough, University of Sheffield


* MedIR’14: Medical Information Retrieval Workshop

http://medir.dcu.ie/

Medical information is accessible from diverse sources including the 
general web, social media, journal articles, and hospital records; users 
include patients and their families, researchers, practitioners and 
clinicians. Challenges in medical information retrieval include: 
diversity of users and user ability; variations in the format, 
reliability, and quality of biomedical and medical information; the 
multimedia nature of data; and the need for accuracy and reliability. 
The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in 
medical information search with the goal of identifying specific 
challenges that need to be addressed to advance the state-of-the-art.

Eiji Aramaki, Kyoto University, Japan
Lorraine Goeuriot, Dublin City University, Ireland
Gareth JF Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland
Liadh Kelly, Dublin City University, Ireland
Henning Müller, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland
Justin Zobel, University of Melbourne, Australia


* PIR’14: Privacy-Preserving IR Workshop — When Information Retrieval 
Meets Privacy and Security

http://www.cs.georgetown.edu/~huiyang/sigir2014-pir-workshop/

Information retrieval and information privacy/security are two 
fast-growing computer science disciplines. There are many synergies and 
connections between these two disciplines. However, there have been very 
limited efforts to connect the two. On the other hand, due to lack of 
mature techniques in privacy-preserving IR, concerns about privacy and 
security have become serious obstacles that prevent valuable user data 
to be used in IR research such as studies about query logs, social 
media, tweets, sessions, and medical record retrieval. This 
privacy-preserving IR workshop aims to spurring research brings together 
the research fields of IR and privacy/security, and mitigate privacy 
threats in information retrieval by exploring novel algorithms and tools.

Luo Si (Purdue University, USA)
Grace Hui Yang (Georgetown University, USA)


* SMIR’14: Semantic Matching in Information Retrieval

http://smir2014.noahlab.com.hk

Recently, significant progress has been made in research on what we call 
semantic matching (SM), in Web search, question answering, online 
advertisement, cross language information retrieval, multimedia 
retrieval, and other tasks. Let us take Web search as example of the 
problem. When comparing the textual content of query and documents, the 
simple term-based approaches can fail when searcher and author use 
different terms. A more realistic approach beyond bag-of-words, referred 
to as semantic matching (SM), is to conduct deeper query and document 
analysis to encode text with richer representations and then perform 
query-document matching with such representations. The main purpose of 
the workshop is to bring together IR and NLP researchers working on or 
interested in semantic matching, to share latest research results, 
express opinions on the related issues, and discuss future directions.

Julio Gonzalo, UNED, Spain
Hang Li, Noah's Ark Lab, Huawei, Hong Kong
Alessandro Moschitti, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
Jun Xu, Noah's Ark Lab, Huawei, Hong Kong


* SoMeRA’14: Social Media Retrieval and Analysis Workshop

http://www.cp.jku.at/conferences/SoMeRA2014/

The SoMeRA 2014 workshop will present and discuss cutting edge research 
on all topics of retrieval, recommendation, and browsing in social 
media, as well as on the analysis of user's multifaceted traces in 
social media. In particular, novel methods and ideas that address 
challenges such as large quantity and noisiness of user-generated 
multimedia data, user biases, cold-start problem, or integrating 
contextual aspects into retrieval and recommendation techniques are 
highly welcome. The workshop will further foster the exchange of ideas 
between different communities, in particular it aims at better 
connecting the multimedia and recommender systems communities with the 
information retrieval community. The workshop will feature both oral 
presentations (full papers) and poster/demo presentations (short papers).

Markus Schedl, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
Peter Knees, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
Jialie Shen, Singapore Management University, Singapore


* TAIA’14: Temporal, social and spatially Aware Information Access Workshop

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/milads/taia2014.aspx

Users provide an unprecedented volume of detailed, and continuously 
updated information about where they are, what they are doing, who they 
are with, and what they are thinking and feeling about their activities. 
The provision of this stream creates an informal contract between the 
user and the information access application in which the user will 
provide the information, but the application must provide results that 
are contextually relevant.  In this workshop we explore spatial and 
temporal context in dynamic geotagged collections, such as Wikipedia, 
and traditional news sources, as well as social media sites such as 
Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and Flickr.  To ground the workshop, and 
provide a locus for discussion of the two aspects of user context, we 
focus on event detection and recommendation.  Events are a natural theme 
around which to center discussions of spatial and temporal context 
because events are defined by their time and place.

Fernando Diaz, Microsoft Research
Claudia Hauff, Delft University of Technology
Vanessa Murdock, Microsoft
Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam
Milad Shokouhi, Microsoft


Please look at the individual websites for the calls, and deadlines — 
and participate in the discussion on the SIGIR’14 workshop day, on 
Friday 11 July 2014, in the beautiful scenery of Gold Coast, Queensland, 
Australia.