Call for Papers:
FOCUSED RETRIEVAL AND RESULT AGGREGATION
Special issue of the Journal of Information Retrieval

GUEST EDITORS
*Andrew Trotman ([log in to unmask]), University of Otago, New Zealand
*Mounia Lalmas ([log in to unmask]), University of Glasgow, UK
*Shlomo Geva ([log in to unmask]), Queensland University of Technology,
Australia
*Jaap Kamps ([log in to unmask]), University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
*Vanessa Murdock ([log in to unmask]), Yahoo! Research Barcelona,
Spain

DETAILS
Standard document retrieval finds atomic documents.  It leaves to the user
the tasks of locating relevant information within a document, and that of
aggregating different results (each corresponding to a piece of the sought
information) into a final answer. Focused retrieval addresses the first task
by providing the user a more direct access to relevant information; result
aggregation addresses the second task by a creating a single "result", an
answer constructed from the relevant components (using summarization and
presentation techniques).

FOCUSED RETRIEVAL aims to identify not only documents relevant to a user
information need, but also where within the document the relevant
information is located. It aims to satisfy the user information need and not
to just identify documents that satisfy the information need.  There are
three main forms of focused retrieval: element retrieval, passage retrieval,
and question answering. Element Retrieval (also known as XML-IR) can be
applied when the documents in the collection contain some kind of markup
(such as XML). The retrieval engine will typically exploit the structure to
identify the most relevant paragraphs, sections or documents to return as
answers to a query. With passage retrieval, the retrieval engine will
typically choose the appropriate size of results to return and the location
based mostly on the content of the document (and sometimes its structure).
Whereas element retrieval and passage retrieval are used for information
seeking questions, question answering (QA) aims to answer more fact seeking
questions, and makes use of natural language processing techniques.

Question answering has been investigated in TREC, CLEF and NCTIR for many
years, and since 2008 in INEX, and is arguably the ultimate goal of semantic
web search research for interrogative information needs. Passage retrieval
has a long history in information retrieval research, including INEX and the
TREC genomics track, but is also important when searching long documents of
any kind. Element retrieval has been the core task at INEX, and is now being
investigated in the INEX book search track.
The aim of element retrieval (XML-IR) is to identify the most relevant
document components to return as an answer to the query. It has already been
shown that returning several elements together as one answer triggers a
stronger user satisfaction than returning a single element on its own. In
the relevance in context retrieval task at INEX, the aim is to return
documents constructed from their most relevant elements; the elements are
aggregated to form one result. More generally, elements or passages from
different documents might be selected to form an aggregated result.  In
Yahoo! Alpha and Google Universal a query already yields results from a
variety of different sources including: images, videos, news, and sponsored
results; all aggregated into a single results page.

RESULT AGGREGATION is a form of automatic document construction. Given a set
of documents and document components that satisfy a user's information need
(perhaps identified using focused retrieval), an aggregator will combine
these into a single result. Techniques include multiple-component
summarization, meta-search like result presentation, and mixed-media
presentation (when searching over heterogeneous collections of, for example,
text, images, video, and music).
This special issue on Focused Retrieval and Result Aggregation intentionally
covers two topics, but in particular we are interested in examining the
entire search process from user query through to aggregated document
presentation. The aim of this special issue is to present the current
state-of-the-art and the most recent developments in focused retrieval,
result aggregation, and their relationship. It also aims to offer a
thoughtful perspective of the potential and emerging challenges of these two
paradigms.

Prospective authors who aim to contribute to this special issue are
encouraged to submit original and unpublished papers dealing with Focused
Retrieval, Result Aggregation, or the combination of the two. Papers are
solicited in any of (but not limited to) the following areas:

*Algorithmic approaches to focused retrieval and/or result aggregation
*Relationship between focused retrieval and result aggregation
*The effect of media, language and context
*Interface and presentation issues
*Evaluation, e.g. effectiveness, user-centered
*Applications, e.g. web search, mobile search, wiki search, wiki linking,
etc
*Use cases, e.g. education, law, travel, etc

IMPORTANT DATES
Papers due: 1 May 2009
Review and revision completed: 1 July 2009
Camera ready paper due: 1 September 2009

SUBMISSION
The guidelines for authors and reviewers are available for download from the
INRT webpage: http://www.springer.com/10791.

Submissions can be uploaded via http://www.editorialmanager.com/inrt and
should be indicated for consideration in the Special Issue on Focused
Retrieval and Result Aggregation"

In case you encounter any difficulties while submitting your manuscript
online, please get in touch with the responsible Editorial Assistant by
clicking on "CONTACT US" in the EditorialManager start page.

Authors are encouraged to contact the guest editors with any questions