Call for Papers

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

Workshop Format

Based on reviewers' comments, a subset of papers will 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.

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).

Please, submit in PDF format to:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eos2011

Using ACM SIG Proceedings style (for LaTeX, use the "Option 2" style):

http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates

Invited Speakers

We are delighted to announce that the workshop will feature the invited talks by:

• Paul Ogilvie (Senior Soft. Engineer, LinkedIn): Anchoring Relevance with Entities (abstract & bio)
• Andrey Plakhov (Senior Soft. Engineer, Search Quality Group, Yandex): Entity-oriented Search Result Diversification (abstract & bio)

Important Dates

• Submissions due: June 13, 2011
• Notification of acceptance: June 30, 2011
• Camera-ready submission: July 8, 2011, 23h59m59s, Apia Samoa time (GMT -11 hours)
• 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)

Workshop Proceedings

The complete proceedings of EOS2011 can be downloaded here: EOS-proceedings.pdf