1st Joint Intl. Workshop on

Entity-oriented and Semantic Search (JIWES)

August 16th, Portland, Oregon, USA
Workshop at ACM SIGIR 2012 Conference
http://km.aifb.kit.edu/ws/jiwes2012/


W O R K S H O P T H E M E

The workshop encompasses various tasks and approaches that go beyond
the traditional bag-of-words paradigm and incorporate an explicit
representation of the semantics behind information needs and relevant
content. This kind of semantic search, based on concepts, entities and
relations between them, has attracted attention both from industry and
from the research community. The workshop aims to bring people from
different communities (IR, SW, DB, NLP, HCI, etc.) and backgrounds
(both academics and industry practitioners) together, to identify and
discuss emerging trends, tasks and challenges. This joint workshop is
a sequel of the Entity-oriented and Semantic Search Workshop series
held at different conferences in previous years.



T O P I C S

The workshop aims to gather all works that discuss entities along
three dimensions: tasks, data and interaction. Tasks include entity
search (search for entities or documents representing entities),
relation search (search entities related to an entity), as well as
more complex tasks (involving multiple entities---spatiotemporal
relations inclusive---, involving multiple queries). In the data
dimension, we consider (web/enterprise) documents (possibly annotated
with entities/relations), LOD, as well as user generated content. The
interaction dimension gives room for research into user interaction
with entities, also considering how to display results, as well as
whether to aggregate over multiple entities to construct entity
profiles.

The workshop especially encourages submissions on the interface of IR
and other disciplines, such as the Semantic Web, Databases,
Computational Linguistics, Data Mining, Machine Learning, or Human
Computer Interaction. Examples of topic of interest include (but are
not limited to):

Data acquisition and processing (crawling, storage, and indexing)
Dealing with noisy, vague and incomplete data
Integration of data from multiple sources
Identification, resolution, and representation of entities (in
documents and in queries)
Retrieval and ranking
Semantic query modeling (detecting, modeling, and understanding
search intents)
Novel entity-oriented information access tasks
Interaction paradigms (natural language, keyword-based, and hybrid
interfaces) and result representation
Test collections and evaluation methodology
Case studies and applications


We particularly encourage formal evaluation of approaches using
previously established evaluation benchmarks.


S U B M I S S I O N I N F O R M A T I O N

We invite submissions of regular research papers (max. 6 pages),
position papers (max. 3 pages), and demo descriptions (max. 3 pages).
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 and will be indexed in the
ACM Digital Library.

Please, submit in PDF format to:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jiwes2012

Using the ACM SIG Proceedings style (for LaTeX, use the "Option 2" style):
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates


B E S T C O N T R I B U T I O N A W A R D

The best contribution (paper/presentation) will receive an award
sponsored by Yandex.


W O R K S H O P F O R M A T

The workshop will comprise of invited talks, oral presentations, and
open-forum discussions.


I M P O R T A N T D A T E S

Submissions due: *** EXTENDED! *** July 9, 2012
Notification of acceptance: July 23, 2012
Camera-ready submission: Aug 1, 2012
Workshop date: Aug 16, 2012




O R G A N I Z I N G C O M M I T T E E

Krisztian Balog (NTNU, Norway)
David Carmel (IBM Research Haifa)
Arjen P. de Vries (CWI/TU Delft, The Netherlands)
Daniel M. Herzig (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
Peter Mika (Yahoo! Research, Barcelona)
Haggai Roitman (IBM Research Haifa)
Ralf Schenkel (Saarland University/MPII)
Pavel Serdyukov (Yandex, Russia)
Thanh Tran Duc (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)



P R O G R A M C O M M I T T E E

Wojciech M. Barczynski (SAP Research)
Roi Blanco (Yahoo! Research)
Pablo Castells (Universidad Aut?noma de Madrid)
Kevin Chang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Gianluca Demartini (University of Fribourg)
Norbert Fuhr (University of Duisburg-Essen)
Michiel Hildebrand (VU University Amsterdam)
Arnd Christian K?nig (Microsoft Research)
Oren Kurland (Technion, Israel Institute of Technology)
Edgar Meij (University of Amsterdam)
Einat Minkov (University of Haifa)
Kavitha Srinivas (IBM Research)
Martin Theobald (Max-Planck-Institut Informatik)
Sivan Yogev (IBM)
Ilya Zaihrayeu (Universit? degli Studi di Trento)



C O N T A C T

jiwes.workshop@gmail.com