Sixth Workshop on
Exploiting Semantic Annotations for Information Retrieval (ESAIR'13)

CIKM 2013, October 28, San Francisco
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kamps/esair13/

Submissions due: July 19

* Updates:
- One week to go -- start to write your 2+1 page paper now!
- Deadline July 19 (pick any timezone).
- Confirmed keynote talks by Kevyn Collins-Thompson, Marti A. Hearst, 
and Dan Roth.
- Planning an exceptional social event after the workshop -- don't miss 
this!

* FINAL Call for Papers

There is an increasing amount of structure on the Web as a result of 
modern Web languages, micro-formats and linked data, user tagging and 
annotation, and emerging robust NLP tools. These meaningful, semantic, 
annotations hold the promise to significantly enhance information 
access, by increasing the depth of analysis of today's systems. 
Currently, we have only started exploring the possibilities and only 
begin to understand how these valuable semantic cues can be put to 
fruitful use. To complicate matters, standard text search excels at 
shallow information needs expressed by short keyword queries, and here 
semantic annotation contributes very little, if anything.

The main questions for the workshop are: How to make use of the 
currently emerging knowledge resources (such as DBpedia, Freebase) as 
underlying semantic model giving access to an unprecedented scope and 
detail of factual information? How to include annotations beyond the 
topical dimension (think of reading level, prerequisite level, content 
credibility, transaction trustworthiness, freshness, genre, sentiment, 
etc) that contain vital cues for matching the specific needs and profile 
of the searcher at hand?

* Many Open Questions

The Workshop will bring together researchers working with semantic 
annotations, its use cases, its sources (authoring to NLP tools), its 
users, and its use in DB, IR, KM, or Web research, and work together on 
a range of open questions:

Application/Use Case: What are use cases that make obvious the need for 
semantic annotation of information? What tasks cannot be solved by 
document retrieval using the traditional bag-of-words? What is keeping 
searchers from exploring these powerful search request? What impact has 
the web of data with more and more information in preprocessed form?

- Annotations: What types of annotation are available? Are there crucial 
differences between author-, software-, user-, and machine-generated 
annotations? Do we annotate types/classes/categories ("person") or 
instances ("Albert Einstein")? How similar or different are linked data 
and annotated text? What are the limitations of the current annotations 
schemes, and how to overcome them?

- Rich Context: Do we annotate text? Or also search requests and 
interactions, and their broader context? Besides personalization and 
geo-positional information, mobiles have a wide and growing range of 
locational, mechanical and even biometrical sensor data available to 
them. Can kick-start the query by inferring task and situational context 
in the mobile use case?

- (Un)certainty: How should we interpret the annotations? Can we 
reliably link textual annotations to known entity catalogs? Can expect a 
messy world to be captured in a clean set of meaningful categories? Or 
is all information fundamentally uncertain and only partly known? How 
can we fruitfully combine information retrieval and semantic web approaches?

These and other related questions will be discussed at this open format 
workshop -- the aim is to provide paths for further research to change 
the way we understand information access today!

* We Need Your Help!

Help us shape the future of information access by increasing the depth 
of analysis of today's systems:

- Submit a short 2+1-page research or position paper explaining your key 
wishes or key points,

- and take actively part in the discussion at the Workshop.

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.

The deadline is Friday July 19, 2013, further submission details are on 
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kamps/esair13/

We are looking forward to a productive, stimulating and fruitful 
workshop day in the tradition of previous ESAIR workshops -- come join 
the discussion!

Paul N. Bennett, Microsoft Research
Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Google
Jaap Kamps, University of Amsterdam
Jussi Karlgren, Gavagai Stockholm