SIGIR 2011 Workshop on "entertain me": Supporting Complex Search Tasks
July 28, Beijing
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kamps/entertainme/

Call for Papers: deadline June 3


* A Workshop on a Single Query ?!?

Searchers with a complex information need typically slice-and-dice their
problem into several queries and subqueries, and laboriously combine the
answers post hoc to solve their tasks. This workshop invites discussion
about any technique, knowledge representation, model or technology to
integrate the search results into a coherent session on a level of
abstraction which matches the original information need.

Consider planning a social event at the last day of SIGIR, in the
unknown city of Beijing, factoring in distances, timing, and preferences
on budget, cuisine, and entertainment. A system supporting the entire
search episode should "know" a lot, either from profiles or implicit
information, or from explicit information in the query or from feedback.
This may lead to the (interactive) construction of a complexly
structured query, but sometimes the most obvious query for a complex
need is dead simple: "entertain me." Rather than returning
ten-blue-lines in response to a 2.4-word query, the desired system
should support searchers during their whole task or search episode, by
iteratively constructing a complex query or search strategy, by
exploring the result-space at every stage, and by combining the partial
answers into a coherent whole.

Although a SIGIR Workshop devoted to a single query may seem
extravagant, this query is just one example of the general problem of
supporting simple and common requests that express complex and dynamic
needs.

* Social Evening Program

Many interesting ideas will come out of the workshop, but how do we know
if they are any good? We will have a special breakout group designing a
mock-up for solving the "entertain me" query, charting out the
background information (implicit and explicit context), the different
sources (maps, web, social, news, ...), and the needed components and
interaction. A group of local Peking University grad students is
available to serve as oracles for local information.

The scientific evaluation of the resulting "entertainment plan" will be
done by executing it in the evening after the workshop, with all
participants.

- Are you willing and able to sponsor the social event? Please contact
the organizers for details.
- Do you want to take part? Read the Call for Submission and contribute!

* Call for Submissions

We invite the submission of papers that think outside the box, from any
aspect of relevance to the workshop's theme, including:

- information seeking behavior, interaction, berry-picking;
- information needs and ways of articulating them;
- implicit and explicit feedback;
- exploiting collection structure and semantic annotations;
- exploratory search, HCI, UI and UX design;
- situated search (maps, Geo, customized, personalized, ...);
- entertainment search (broadcasters, content owners, network operators,
device manufacturers).

We aim to bring together a varied group of researchers covering both
user and system centered approaches, and together work on ways to make
IR systems support searchers when interactively solving a complex task,
such as the entertain me planning problem.

Help us shape the future of IR!

- Submit a short 2-page poster or position paper of relevance to
supporting complex tasks, e.g., that identify specific research problems
and use-cases, develop models/theory of complex tasks and interaction,
discuss novel interfaces or system components, examine ways of
evaluating, and/or report on preliminary experiments,

- and take actively part in the discussion at the Workshop.

The deadline is Monday June 3, 2011, submission details and further
information are on http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kamps/entertainme/

Nick Belkin (Rutgers)
Charlie Clarke (Waterloo)
Ning Gao (Peking University)
Jaap Kamps (Amsterdam)
Jussi Karlgren (SICS)