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8th Workshop on
Exploiting Semantic Annotations for Information Retrieval (ESAIR’15)
in conjunction with CIKM 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS

https://www.esair.org/
23 October 2015, Melbourne, Australia
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IMPORTANT DATES
Regular paper submission: 2 July 2015
Special track for re-submissions of CIKM papers: 8 July 2015
Notification of acceptance: 23 July 2015
Camera ready: 7 August 2015
Workshop: 23 October 2015

OVERVIEW
The amount of structured content published on the Web has been growing rapidly, making it possible to address increasingly complex information access tasks. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of large scale human-curated knowledge bases as well as a growing array of techniques that identify or extract information automatically from unstructured and semi-structured sources. Yet, the potential of rich document annotations cannot be fully realized when information needs are expressed only by short keyword queries. One main open research challenge, and opportunity, remains on the users’ side: how to encourage and allow searchers to articulate longer, semantically enriched queries? And, assuming users’ would be willing to provide additional details, what type of annotations would benefit retrieval systems the most?

The ESAIR workshop series aims to advance the general research agenda on this core problem. The eighth edition of ESAIR, with a renewed set of organizers, sets its focus on
applications. We invite presentations of prototype systems in a dedicated “Annotations in Action” demo track, in addition to the regular research and position paper contributions. The desired result of the workshop is a roadmap and research agenda that guides academic efforts and aligns them with industrial directions and developments.

SCOPE AND TOPICS
The Workshop will bring together researchers working with semantic annotations, its use cases, its sources, its users, and its use in DB, IR, KM, or Web research, and work together on a range of open questions:

By semantic annotations we refer to linguistic annotations (such as named entities, semantic classes or roles, etc.) as well as user annotations (such as micro-formats, RDF, tags, etc.). ESAIR’15 will continue, with a new generation of organizers, on the path set by the previous edition(s) of the workshop: clarifying the exact role of semantic annotations in supporting complex search tasks.

Annotations come in a variety of flavors (named entities, temporal information, geo-positional markers, semantic roles, sentiment, etc.) and there is a growing repertoire of tools and techniques available for extracting these annotations automatically from text. The question then presents itself: what, if anything, is missing? We seek to answer this question by focusing on applications that are rooted in specific, real-world use cases; we also provide a number of such use cases, as motivational examples.

Topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to:
Applications and use cases
What are use cases that make obvious the need for semantic annotation of information?
What tasks cannot be solved by traditional (bag-of-words) retrieval approaches?
Annotations
What types of annotation are available and what is missing?
Are there crucial differences between human and machine-generated annotations?
How should we deal with the uncertainty of annotations?
User interfaces and interaction
How to aid users in articulating powerful queries (beyond a few keywords)?
How to present results and interact with users in an intelligible way?
Evaluation
How to evaluate semantic annotations (component-based vs. end-to-end)?

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
All submissions must be formatted according to the ACM SIG proceedings format (option 2).
Regular research papers (4+ pages, with an expected mean of 6 pages)
Position papers (2+1 pages)
Demo papers (4+ pages)

What's a 2+1 page paper? We like short and focused contributions highlighting your main point, claim, observation, finding, experiment, project, etc, (roughly 2 pages of mainly text) but we also like clear tables, graphs, and full citations (that's the "+1" page). So your submission can up three pages, as long as max. 2 of them are narrative text.

We also invite researchers and practitioners to present their innovative prototypes in a dedicated “Annotation in Action” demo track at the workshop. Demo submissions must be based on an implemented system that pursues one or more aspects relevant to the interest areas of the workshop. A Best Demonstration Award will be presented to the authors of the most outstanding demo at the workshop.

The reviewing process is single-blind, so submissions do not need to be anonymized. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to present their work at the workshop.

Please submit your paper through the submission website:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=esair15

The deadline for regular papers is July 2nd. The workshop also offers a track for authors of papers that were not successful at the main conference for their work to be considered for presentation at the workshop; the deadline for these contributions is July 8. In this case, authors are required to attach the reviews for their paper along with the paper so as to facilitate the decision process.

ORGANIZERS
Krisztian Balog, University of Stavanger, Norway
Jeffrey Dalton, Google Research, USA
Antoine Doucet, University of La Rochelle, L3i Laboratory, France
Yusra Ibrahim, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany