INitiative for the Evaluation of XML retrieval (INEX)

Call for participation INEX 2008

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN AT http://www.inex.otago.ac.nz


OVERVIEW
INEX 2008 is examining focused (or sub-document) retrieval using the 
Wikipedia Collection.  For the main ad hoc retrieval track the collection 
will be made available in Plain Text as well as XML so that also non-XML 
based passage retrieval systems can be used. Other tracks are: Book 
Searching (using a collection of full text books in XML), Efficiency, Entity 
Ranking, Interactive (iTrack), Question Answering (QA@INEX), Link-the-Wiki, 
and XML-Mining. All INEX Participants are expected to participate in topic 
creation, and assessment.


TASKS AND TRACKS
* Ad hoc Track - The main track of INEX 2008 will investigate the 
effectiveness of XML-IR and Passage Retrieval for three ad hoc retrieval 
tasks (Focused, Relevant in Context, Best in Context).
* Book Searching Track --  Investigating information access to, and IR 
techniques for searching full texts of digitized books.
* Efficiency Track - Investigating both the effectiveness and efficiency of 
XML ranked retrieval approaches on real data and real queries.
* Entity Ranking Track - Investigating entity retrieval rather than text 
retrieval: 1) Entity Ranking, 2) Entity List Completion.
* Interactive Track (iTrack) --  Investigating the behavior of users when 
interacting with XML documents, as well as develop retrieval approaches 
which are effective in user-based environments.
* Question Answering (QA@INEX) Track -- Investigating technology for 
accessing semi-structured data can be used to address real-world focused 
information needs formulated as natural language questions.
* Link-the-Wiki Track - Investigating link discovery between Wikipedia 
documents, both at the file level and at the element level.
* XML-Mining Track - Investigating structured document mining, especially 
the classification and clustering of semi-structured documents.

A detailed description of each of the tracks can be found at 
http://www.inex.otago.ac.nz/.

IMPORTANT DATES
The schedule of the main ad hoc track is as follows:
1/04/2008  Registration deadline
28/04/2008 Release of Topic Creation Guidelines
12/05/2008 Submission deadline for candidate topics
2/06/2008  Release of final set of topics
2/06/2008  Release of Result Submission Specification
7/07/2008  Submission deadline for ad hoc search results
28/07/2008 Release of assessment pools
15/09/2008 Submission deadline for relevance assessments
3/11/2008  Release of ad hoc evaluation results
24/11/2008 Submission deadline for papers for pre-proceedings (all tracks)
8/12/2008  Release of workshop pre-proceedings
15-18/12/2008 INEX Workshop in Dagstuhl
Other tracks will follow variants of this schedule.

RELEVANCE ASSESSMENTS
Relevance assessments will be provided by the participating groups using the 
INEX assessment system. Each participating organization will judge about 3 
topics. Please note that the assessment of each topic may take one-person 1 
to 2 days to complete!

WORKSHOP AND PROCEEDINGS
Participants will be able to present their approaches and the final results 
at the INEX workshop to be held in December at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany. 
All participants will be able to publish their work in the workshop 
pre-proceedings.  Fully peer-reviewed and revised papers will be published 
in the INEX post-workshop final proceedings. Since 2004 the final 
proceedings have been published in the Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer 
Science (LNCS) series, and we hope to continue that tradition.