Call for papers: ESAIR'09 workshop

Barcelona, Spain
February 9, 2009

Co-located with WSDM 2009


EXPLOITING SEMANTIC ANNOTATIONS IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

After the success of the first ESAIR (ESAIR'08), we've decided to organize
this workshop one more year, this time co-located with WSDM 2009, in
Barcelona.

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
-----------------------------
ESAIR09 will be a one-day workshop which will alternate short paper
presentations, open discussions and demos. Paper and demos presented will be
peer-reviewed. ESAIR09 will be held on February 9, in conjunction with the
Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM
2009).

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

"ESAIR09 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: December 5, 2008
* Notifications: January 2, 2009
* Final copy: January 12, 2009
* Workshop: February 9, 2009

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

Program Committee
--------------------------
* TBA