[Sigbioinform-l] CFP: TREC Genomics Pre-Track Workshop at JCDL 2002

[William Hersh]

CALL FOR PAPERS

TEXT RETRIEVAL CONFERENCE (TREC) GENOMICS PRE-TRACK WORKSHOP

To be held at:  Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2002 (www.jcdl2002.org)

Thursday, July 18, 2002
Lloyd Center Doubletree Hotel
Portland, Oregon, USA

William Hersh, Workshop Chair, hersh at ohsu.edu

The goal of this workshop is to allow individuals interested in the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC, trec.nist.gov) Genomics Pre-Track to come together to discuss common goals and interests for the pre-track.  The workshop will be designed to generate a plan for developing a common set of tasks, databases, and evaluation measures for the pre-track.  The morning will be devoted to presentations by attendees, with the topics to be covered determined by selection by the program committee.  The afternoon will be geared towards developing a plan for the pre-track, with the structure based on the number of attendees (i.e., if attendance is large, we will break into small groups).

Background:

The Text Retrieval Conference (TREC, trec.nist.gov) is an annual activity of the information retrieval (IR) community aiming to evaluate IR systems and users.  It is sponsored by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST).  IR has historically focused on document retrieval, but the field has expanded in recent years with the growth of new information needs (e.g., question-answering, multi-lingual) and platforms (the Web).  A key feature of TREC is that research groups work on a common source of data and a common set of queries or tasks.  The goal is to allow comparisons across systems and approaches in a research-oriented, collegial manner.

In recent years, interest at TREC has also grown to other types of data besides textual documents, such as video.  Another category of data that participants are interested in is structured data, and one interest within that category is genomics data.

At the same time, the growing field of bioinformatics has begun to take an interest in a number of IR-related issues.  Interest is particular high in information extraction (IE), an area related to IR and one in which many IR researchers have worked.

Thus the time seems ripe to foster collaboration across these communities.  The TREC activity is organized into "tracks" of common interest, such as question-answering, multi-lingual IR, Web searching, and interactive retrieval.  TREC generally works on an annual cycle, with data distributed in the spring, experiments run in the summer, and the results presented at the annual conference which usually takes place in November.  TREC also has a notion of exploratory efforts, called "pre-tracks."

For TREC 2002, there will be a "Genomics Pre-Track."  The current thinking is that we will devote the TREC 2002 pre-track to assembling an information collection and set of queries/tasks.  There will be challenges to finding common ground across the IR and bioinformatics communities, i.e., balancing the domain-specific needs of the latter with the aim for generalizability for the former.

A Web survey was recently posted soliciting interest in the track and this workshop.  Over 80 people expressed interest in the track, with about half of them indicating they would be interested in attending a workshop at JCDL 2002 on  July 18th.

The objectives of the workshop will be to:
1.	Allow the IR/digital library and genomics/bioinformatics communities become familiar with each other through a series of presentations on past work, current interests, and future goals.
2.	Have discussion on how to proceed with the pre-track, in particular focusing on the IR/IE tasks, databases and other resources to use, and evaluation measures.

Workshop Schedule:

The morning will be devoted to presentations by attendees, with the topics to be covered determined by selection by the program committee.  The afternoon will be geared towards developing a plan for the pre-track, with the structure based on the number of attendees (i.e., if attendance is large, we will break into smaller groups).

Call for Papers/Presentations:

For the morning, we would like to have 12-15 presentations on the various types of work going on in the IR, TREC, and genomics community.  A program committee has been assembled to review proposals and select a group of them that draw on the diverse constituencies and interests in the workshop and pre-track.  The two-page proposals for presentation (see below) will be bundled into a proceedings and distributed to all attendees.

Submitting proposals:

If you are interested in presenting, please submit a two-page proposal to the workshop chair, William Hersh, by email (hersh at ohsu.edu), in ASCII or PDF form by May 24, 2002.  Your proposal should discuss what you want to talk about, your previous work, and what you are interested in terms of a common evaluation platform.  Authors will be notified of acceptance around June 10, 2002.