First International Workshop on Graph Search and Beyond (GSB’15)

SIGIR 2015, August 13, Santiago
http://humanities.uva.nl/~kamps/gsb15/

Submissions due: June 1

* Call for Papers

Information on the Web is increasingly structured in terms of entities 
and relations from large knowledge resources, geo-temporal references 
and social network structure, resulting in a massive multidimensional 
graph. This graph essentially unifies both the searcher and the 
information resources that played a fundamentally different role in 
traditional IR, and offers major new ways to access relevant 
information.  In services that rely on personalized information like 
social networks, the graph plays an even more important role, in other 
words: _you_ are the query.

Graph search affects both query formulation as well as result 
exploration and discovery. On the one hand, it allows for incrementally 
expressing complex information needs that triangulate information about 
multiple entities or entity types, relations between those entities, 
with various filters on geo-temporal constraints or the sources of 
information used (or ignored), and taking into account the rich profile 
and context information of the searcher (and his/her peers, and peers of 
peers, etc). On the other hand, it allows for more powerful ways to 
explore the results from various aspects and viewpoints, by slicing and 
dicing the information using the graph structure, and using the same 
structure for explaining why results are retrieved or recommended, and 
by whom.

* Many Open Questions

We view the notion of `graph search' as searching information from your 
personal point of view (you are the query) over a highly structured and 
curated information space. This goes beyond the traditional two-term 
queries and ten blue links results that users are familiar with, 
requiring a highly interactive session covering both query formulation 
and result exploration, and raises many open questions:

- IR Theory: What happens if search gets personal? Does this break the 
classic dichotomy between users and documents, as users are nodes in the 
social network data themselves? What is the consequence of ultimate 
personalization, as the local graph differs for all users? As the local 
graph structure is key, does this obviate the need for large central 
indexes? Do these types of requests fit in the classic paradigm (e.g., 
Broder's taxonomy)? How does this shift the balance between the control 
of the searcher and the ranker over the result set?

- Data Integration: Building a knowledge graph requires massive data 
integration at many levels: are there trade-offs in simplicity and level 
of detail (such as the classic knowledge representation trade-off)? What 
levels of granularity and comprehensiveness are needed for effective 
deployment? What quality is needed: is any noise acceptable? How to deal 
with near duplicate detection, conflation, or entity disambiguation?

- Use Cases and Applications: Rather than a universal solution, graph 
search is particularly useful for specific types of information needs 
and queries. What are the data and tasks that make graph search works? 
What kind of scenarios that would benefit from a graph model? In what 
context can switching perspectives by showing results from the vista of 
other persons useful?

- Query formulation: How to move from singular queries to highly 
interactive sessions with multiple variant queries? What new tools are 
needed to help a searcher construct the appropriate graph search query 
using refinements or filters to better articulate their needs, or 
explore further aspects? How can we augment query autocompletion to 
actively prompt user to interactively construct longer queries exploring 
different aspects?

- Result Exploration: There is a radical shift towards the control of 
the searcher---small changes in the query can lead to radically 
different result sets---how can we support active exploration of slices 
of the data to explore further aspects? Unlike traditional facetted 
search options, the result space is highly dynamic, how can we provide 
adaptive exploration options tailored to the context and searcher, at 
every stage of the process?

- Evaluation: How do we know the system is any good? How to evaluate the 
overall process, given its personalized and interactive nature? %How to 
evaluate the first stage as essentially a form of query autocomplete? 
And how to evaluate the second stage as to explore and exploit the 
result set? Can we rely on the direct evaluation of query suggestions 
and query recommendations? Are there suitable behavioral criteria for in 
the wild testing, such as longer queries, multiple filters, longer 
dwell-time, more active engagement, more structured-query templates? Can 
we use are standard experimental evaluation methods from HCI and UI/UX 
design?

- Privacy: Access to personal data is fraught ethical and privacy 
concerns, is there is similarly structured public data for scientific 
research? As an extreme form of personalization, how to avoid the 
uncanny cave, filter bubbles and echo chambers? How ethical is it to 
privilege a particular query refinement suggestion over the many other 
possible candidates?

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 3+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 3+1 page paper?  We like short and focused contributions 
highlighting your main point, claim, observation, finding, experiment, 
project, etc, (roughly 3 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. 3 of them are narrative text.

The deadline is Monday June 1, 2015, further submission details are on 
http://humanities.uva.nl/~kamps/gsb15/

We are looking forward to a productive, stimulating and fruitful 
workshop day -- including an social event -- come join the discussion!

Omar Alonso, Microsoft
Martin Hearst, UC Berkeley
Jaap Kamps, University of Amsterdam