Apologies for the duplicate post. There was an incorrect affiliation
on the previous one.

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ECIR'08 Workshop - Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information
Retrieval
March 30, 2008, Glasgow

http://www.yr-bcn.es/esair08

The goal of this workshop is to create a forum for researchers
interested in the use of semantic annotations for information
retrieval. By semantic annotations we refer to linguistic annotations
(such as named entities, semantic classes, etc.) as well as user
annotations such as microformats, RDF, tags, etc. The aim of this
workshop is not semantic annotation itself, but rather the
applications of semantic annotation to information retrieval tasks
such as ad-hoc retrieval, classification, browsing, textual mining,
summarization, question answering, etc.

In the recent years there has been a lot of discussion about semantic
annotation of documents. There are many forms of annotations and many
techniques that identify or extract them. As NLP tagging techniques
mature, more and more annotations can be automatically extracted from
free text. In particular, techniques have been developed to ground
named entities in terms of geo-codes, ISO time codes, Gene Ontology
ids, etc. Furthermore, the number of collections which explicitly
identify entities is growing fast with Web 2.0 and Semantic Web
initiatives.

Despite the growing number and complexity of annotations, and despite
the potential impact that these may have in information retrieval
tasks, annotations have not yet made a significant impact in
Information Retrieval research or applications. Further research is
needed before we can unleash the potential of annotations!

Workshop Information

ESAIR08 will be a one-day workshop which will alternate short paper
presentations, open discussions and demos. Paper and demos presented
will be peer-reviewed.

Submissions

Submissions should be in the PDF format be sent by email to
oralonso_at_gmail.com and hugoz_at_yahoo-inc.com with the title
"ESAIR08 paper/demo submission". Other than this there are no rules
with respect to style or length limit. Submissions do not need to be
anonymous. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

Paper submissions: we encourage short paper submissions describing
novel work which may not be yet fully evaluated (i.e. somewhere
between a poster and a conference paper).

Demo submissions: please send a (PDF) description of the demo with
many snapshots (or a url if the demo is public).

Important Dates

- Submission date: Sunday 17 February
- Notifications: by 1 March
- Final copy: by 10 March

Organizers

- Omar Alonso, A9.com (USA)
- Hugo Zaragoza, Yahoo! Research Barcelona (Spain)

Program Committee

- John Atkinson, Universidad de Concepcion
- Jamie Callan, Carnegie Mellon University
- Arjen de Vries, CWI
- Michael Gertz, University of California
- Marko Grobelnik, Institute Jozef Stefan
- Peter Jackson, Thomson Corporation
- Aaron Kaplan, Xerox Research
- Mounia Lalmas, Queen Mary U.
- Hang Li, Microsoft Research
- Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research
- Inderjeet Mani, Brandeis University/MITRE
- Mark Stevenson, University of Sheffield
- Anne-Marie Vercoustre, Inria-Rocquencourt