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Workshops
New Directions For IR Evaluation
http://www.ict.usc.edu/~leuski/sigir04-oc/
Our goal is to bring
together researchers from information retrieval and related research
communities (e.g., recommender systems, text data mining,
computer-supported cooperative work, and online communities) to explore new
directions for evaluation-guided research on the development of systems to
support information access. We propose to organize this workshop around two
key questions:
1) What opportunities exist
to foster important new research through the creation of test collections
for genre that have not previously been available?
2) What types of task models
should new test collections be designed to support?
Test collections developed
at venues such as TREC, NTCIR, CLEF and TDT have historically focused strongly
(although not exclusively) on news, in part because it has proven to be
practical to assemble large collections of news stories, and in part
because good performance in that domain seems to also yield good
performance on a broader range of information access tasks. Recent years
have seen this focus expand to include, for example, a Web track (at TREC)
and patent retrieval (at NTCIR). Similarly, the TREC video track is now
working with non-news content. Our goal for this workshop is to focus on
the domain of on-line conversations, to see whether there is a sufficient
interest in the IR community to study the genre, and propose the ways in
which such a study could be facilitated through the creation of standard
test collections.
RIA and
"Where can IR go from here?"
http://www.itl.nist.gov/iaui/894.02/sigir.04/04.ria.agenda.html
In the summer of 2003, NIST
organised a 6-week workshop called Reliable Information Access or RIA. The
RIA workshop brought together seven different top research IR systems and
investigated how the systems were getting their results, and why the
systems failed on some topics and succeeded on others. The SIGIR 2004
workshop will focus on discussing the implications of lessons learned from
RIA; how they affect our understanding of what is currently happening in
research systems, and what they suggest are areas of IR research that
warrant immediate concentrated work. The main goal of the workshop is to
end up with a list of concrete research proposals suggested by the lessons
from the RIA workshop and the RIA databases. The proposals will run the
gamut from undergraduate projects through SIGIR papers up to Ph.D. thesis
areas.
Peer-to-Peer
IR
http://p2pir.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de/
Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems
have emerged as a popular way to share huge volumes of data. However,
retrieval methods for P2P systems are still in their infancy. This workshop
will focus on new methods of resource representation, resource selection,
and data fusion in peer-to-peer networks. The workshop particularly
encourages papers that address heterogeneous peer-to-peer networks (e.g. a
variety of data types and service providers), as well as papers about
methods that cope with partial and uncertain information. However, more
broadly, papers are solicited on any topic related to IR in peer-to-peer
networks.
This workshop will discuss
current retrieval methods of P2P systems, as well as the adaptation of
distributed IR methods for P2P systems. Thus, it will involve both
researchers from the P2P area interested in IR methods as well as IR
researchers aiming at extending their methods for P2P systems.
Information
Retrieval in Context
http://ir.dcs.gla.ac.uk/context/
There is a growing
realisation that relevant information will be accessible increasingly
across media and genres, across languages and across modalities. The
retrieval of such information will depend on time, place, history of
interaction, task in hand, and a range of other factors that are not given
explicitly but are implicit in the interaction and ambient environment,
namely the context. IR research is now conducted in multi-media,
multi-lingual, and multi-modal environments, but largely out of context.
However, such contextual data can be used effectively to constrain
retrieval of information thereby reducing the complexity of the retrieval
process. To achieve this, context models for different modalities will need
to be developed so that they can be deployed effectively to enhance
retrieval performance. Thus truly context-aware and -dependent retrieval
will become feasible.
This workshop will explore a
variety of theoretical frameworks, characteristics and research approaches
to focus on an agenda of activities to be recommended for future
interactive IR (IIR) research.
Search
and Discovery in Bioinformatics
http://lair.indiana.edu/sigirbio/
There are now numerous
bioinformatics resources containing research literature, genetic sequences,
protein sequences and protein structures. Large-scale efforts are underway
to organise these rapidly growing resources and create effective tools for
supporting access. Although there is increasing interest among members of
the information science community in bioinformatics content, few forums
exist where challenges in this area are addressed from the perspective of IR
researchers.
A major goal of the workshop
is to attract researchers interested in various critical facets of
bioinformatics information retrieval research. Another goal is to provide opportunities
for sharing of current findings, discussing major challenges, and
developing networks of collaborators.
Integration
of Information Retrieval and Databases (IR + DB)
http://www.cwi.nl/~arjen/wird04/
Information retrieval (IR)
is associated by many with 'document retrieval' because of its past (and
still ongoing) focus on text document retrieval. Database (DB) research his
associated with (object-) relational data modelling, SQL, transaction-based
processing, and many more aspects of databases. Whereas DB research has
been driven for years by structured languages and the idea of data
modelling and abstraction, IR focused on measuring retrieval quality for
large (mostly text) collections. Nowadays, multimedia and XML collections
are a driving force for the integration of IR and DB approaches. IR yields
the methods for relevance-based ranking, while DB research provides methods
for dealing with structured, and, increasingly, semi-structured data.
The purpose of this workshop
is to bring together researchers of the DB and IR fields, facilitating
exchange on the progress in developing and applying IR+DB (or DB+IR)
approaches. Applications include data warehousing, web retrieval,
heterogeneous collections, semantically rich information systems, and
others. The workshop covers theoretical as well as pragmatic research.
XML and
Information Retrieval
http://sigir.org/sigir2004/xml.htm
The focus of this workshop
will be on issues related to the application of IR methods to XML data for
querying, retrieval, navigating, etc. We believe that we have come a long
way since the first workshop in 2000, when XML was entirely dominated by
the DB community. However, there is still room for more efforts in this
field, in particular from the IR point of view. The third workshop will
bring together researchers and practitioners interested in XML and IR. We
will review the progress that has been made since the two previous
workshops. More specifically, recent technologies, models and new efforts
will be discussed.
Geographical
IR
http://www.geo.unizh.ch/~rsp/gir/
Information technology for
handling geographic information has been based largely on the highly
structured map-based representations of space used in most geographical
information systems (GIS). Relatively little effort has been expended on
developing facilities required to access less structured, textual
information, in which geographical context may be given by place names and
associated terminology for spatial relationships. Such geographical text is
commonly found in web documents, but geographical terms are considered by
conventional search engines no differently to other search terms. As a
consequence, documents will only be retrieved if they contain exact matches
with the geographical terminology in the query expression. Documents that
refer to alternative versions of the query place name or to places that are
in the vicinity, either nearby or even within the query place are unlikely
to be found.
In recent years, a variety
of work has looked at the potential of indexing and retrieving unstructured
text from the web using geospatial location. The purpose of this workshop
is to bring together the growing community of researchers and practitioners
working in the field of geographic information retrieval to discuss
progress within the field and discuss future research strands. We aim to
produce a high quality publication setting out the state of the art in
Geographic Information Retrieval and suggesting a research agenda for the
coming years.
Mathematical
Formal Methods
http://www.dcs.vein.hu/CIR/mfir_2004.html
This workshop aims to
promote discussion and interaction among those with theoretical and
applicative research interests in mathematical/formal aspects of
Information Retrieval coming from a - potentially and relatively - large
spectrum of different IR fields, and also at being a forum for the
presentation of both theoretical and applicative results (e.g.,
foundational issues; description and/or integration of models; retrieval
applications; mathematical/formal techniques, properties and structures in
IR; existing and/or new theories and theoretical aspects).
Programme
Semantic
Web
http://www.deri.at/events/workshops/sigir2004/
Tim
Berners-Lee created the vision of a Semantic Web that enables automated
information access and use, based on machine-processable semantics of data.
Information retrieval can benefit from building ontologies and other
semantic structures, making it possible to have a better understanding of
the application domains and user queries. Indeed, Semantic Web technologies
could be a basis for intelligent retrieval. On the other hand, the
Information Retrieval field has a lot to bring to the Semantic Web
community, based on 30 years of research and development based in the
context of very large collections of documents. This workshop aims to bring
researchers from the two communities together.
The workshop will explore a
variety of theoretical frameworks, applications, techniques and research
approaches centred on how to achieve mutual benefit from IR and Semantic
Web, as well as high impact.
Information
Retrieval For Question Answering
http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/ir4qa04/
Open domain question
answering has become a very active research area over the past few years,
due in large measure to the stimulus of the TREC Question Answering track.
This track addresses the task of finding exact answers to natural language
(NL) questions (e.g. "How tall is the Eiffel Tower") from large text
collections. To find exact answers requires processing texts at a level of
detail that cannot be carried out at retrieval time for very large text
collections. This limitation has led many researchers to propose, broadly,
a two stage approach to the QA task. In stage one, a subset of
query-relevant texts are selected from the whole collection. In stage two,
this subset is subjected to detailed processing for answer extraction. To
date, stage one has received limited explicit attention, despite its obvious
importance - performance at stage two is bounded by performance at stage
one. The goal of this workshop is to correct this situation, and,
hopefully, to draw attention of IR researchers to the specific challenges
raised by QA.
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