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                First Call for Papers:
Information Retrieval ( http://springer.com/10791 )
Special Issue on Search Intents and Diversification

Submissions due: Apr 2, 2012
Final accept/reject decisions: July 31, 2012
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MOTIVATION AND BACKGROUND

Information retrieval users have diverse search needs, and the
level of detail given in the user's search query can differ
widely depending on how clear the underlying information need
itself is, the user's search environment (e.g. input device),
and how difficult it is for the user to express the need in the
form of a query. For these reasons, many queries are ambiguous
and/or underspecified.

In light of this, research in accommodating different search
intents has received a lot of attention lately. For example,
major conferences like SIGIR, WWW and WSDM have begun to see
papers on search result diversification, which aims to capture
different user needs within one entry-point search result page.
This problem was discussed intensively at the ECIR 2011 Diversity
in Document Retrieval Workshop, and a follow-up workshop will
take place at WSDM 2012. Also, starting at TREC 2009,
the TREC Web and Blog tracks have measured the diversity of
participating systems in retrieving web pages and blog posts,
respectively. Moreover, the recent INTENT task at NTCIR-9
tackles not only search result diversification but also the
task of mining intents given a query.

As the third round of the TREC web diversity track and the first
round of the NTCIR INTENT task conclude toward the end of 2011,
we believe that the timing is right for a special issue on
search intents and diversification to be published in 2012, in
order to highlight the advances and clarify the future goals in
this area. We welcome relevant submissions from these evaluation
venues as well as from outside.


SCOPE

We encourage submissions that are related to one or more
of the following themes:

- Intent and diversity related tasks at TREC, NTCIR and other
IR evaluation venues
- Interpreting and mining search intents
- Handling navigational and informational search intents
- Handling ambiguity and multiple facets in queries
- Handling novelty/redundancy and diversity
- Building intent and diversity related test collections
- Diversification in non-traditional IR tasks,
e.g. aggregated search, exploratory search and session IR
- Interfaces for presenting diversified search results
- Evaluation methods for intent and diversity


IMPORTANT DATES

Apr 02, 2012 Submissions due
May 21, 2012 First-round reviews sent to authors
Jun 18, 2012 Revised manuscripts due
Jul 31, 2012 Final decisions sent to authors


SUBMISSIONS

Detailed instructions will be announced later this year.
Manuscripts must adhere to the format guidelines shown in the
"Instructions for Authors" page available from
http://springer.com/10791 .


GUEST EDITORS

Tetsuya Sakai tesakai at microsoft.com

Noriko Kando kando at nii.ac.jp

Craig Macdonald craig.macdonald at glasgow.ac.uk

Ian Soboroff ian.soboroff at nist.gov

Please contact the guest editors if you have any questions.


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Rakesh Agrawal, Microsoft Research
Javed Aslam, Northeastern University
Ben Carterette, University of Delaware
Olivier Chapelle, Yahoo! Labs
Charlie Clarke, University of Waterloo
Evangelos Kanoulas, University of Sheffield
Mounia Lalmas, Yahoo!
Hang Li, Microsoft
Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow
Filip Radlinksi, Microsoft
Davood Rafiei, University of Alberta
Stephen Robertson, Microsoft
Ian Ruthven, University of Strathclyde
Rodrygo Santos, University of Glasgow
Jun Wang, University College London
William Webber, University of Melbourne
Emine Yilmaz, Microsoft,
ChengXiang Zhai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Min Zhang, Tsinghua University


The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401