Workshops

Friday August 19, 2005

Workshops have open registration (i.e., permission is not required from the organizers of an individual workshop to register for it).

1. IRiX: Information Retrieval in Context
   http://irix.umiacs.umd.edu
   Submission Deadline: May 15, 2005
   Organizers: Peter Ingwersen, Kalervo Jarvelin, Nick Belkin
   
   Context implies commonly interactive IR. It is assumed that contextual data can be used effectively to constrain retrieval of information thereby reducing the complexity of the retrieval process. The challenge is to understand and capture relevant context features. The IRiX workshop will focus on three major lines of action that explore the central features or evidence of context: 1) What are the elements of context, which are potentially significant to IR? 2) Which of these elements are, or could be useful in improving IR? 3) How can features of context be used to improve IR? IRiX provides: Oral presentations on actions, selected background position papers and discussion group activities.
2. Multimedia Information Retrieval
   http://mmir.doc.ic.ac.uk/mmir2005
   Submission deadline: May 15, 2005
   Organizers: Alex Hauptmann, R. Manmatha, Stefan Rueger
   
   This full-day workshop will include discussion and papers. The workshop solicits submissions on searching and retrieving images, speech, video, text and music or any combination of these; topics include but are not limited to: Content-based indexing, search and retrieval; Feature extraction and representation; Automated semantic annotation; Relevance feedback; Query models, paradigms and languages; Search and browsing mechanisms; Document classification; Evaluation; User studies; Meta-data (e.g., MPEG-7); Ontologies and Taxonomies; and Applications.
3. ELECTRA: Methodologies and Evaluation of Lexical Cohesion Techniques in Real-World Applications (Beyond Bag of Words)
   http://research.yahoo.com/workshops/electra2005/
   Submission Deadline: May 15, 2005
   Organizers: Olga Vechtomova, Rosie Jones, Gael Dias
   
   In this workshop we are interested in pointing at successes and failures of the integration of lexical cohesion in real-world IR applications such as document and passage retrieval, question answering, topic segmentation and text summarization. On the one hand, lexical cohesion has received much attention in Information Retrieval research during its more than 30-year old history, but so far with mixed results. On the other hand, a considerable amount of research has been devoted to this subject, both in terms of theory and practice, by the Natural Language Processing community, but with limited evaluation in real-world applications. This workshop is intended to bring together IR and NLP researchers and discuss what has been achieved in this area, to establish common themes between different approaches, and to discuss future research directions.
4. Predicting Query Difficulty - Methods and Applications
   http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/sigir05-qp/index.html
   Submission Deadline: May 15, 2005
   Organizers: David Carmel, Ian Soboroff
   
   Estimation of query difficulty is an attempt to quantify the quality of results returned by the search system for a query. Ideally, a system that can predict difficult queries can adapt parameters or change algorithms to suit the query. In this workshop we would like to explore techniques for prediction of and adaptation to query difficulty. We plan to focus on the reasons that cause a specific query to become difficult, classification of queries and failure modes, evaluation methodology, as well as on potential applications for query prediction.
5. Mathematical/Formal Methods in Information Retrieval
   Web site: http://ir.dcs.gla.ac.uk/mfir
   Submission Deadline: May 20, 2005
   Organizers: Sandor Dominich and Iadh Ounis
   
   This workshop aims at promoting discussion and interaction among those with theoretical and applicative research interests in mathematical/formal aspects of Information Retrieval coming from a large spectrum of different IR fields, and also at being a forum for the presentation of both theoretical and applicative results (e.g., foundational issues; description and/or integration of models; retrieval applications; mathematical/formal techniques, properties and structures in IR; existing and/or new theories and theoretical aspects, interdisciplinary approaches).
6. Heterogeneous and Distributed Information Retrieval
   http://hdir2005.isti.cnr.it
   Submission Deadline: June 15, 2005
   Organizers: Ranieri Baraglia, Domenico Laforenza, Fabrizio Silvestri
   
   This workshop will focus on new methods and algorithms to efficiently and effectively access data distributed over large heterogeneous distributed systems. The workshop particularly encourages papers that address the creation and the search in distributed, dynamic information systems as well as papers presenting novel architectural solution for these systems. However, more broadly, papers are solicited on any topic related to information retrieval in distributed architectures.
7. Stylistic Analysis of Text for Information Access
   http://lingcog.iit.edu/style2005/
   Submission Deadline: May 20, 2005
   Organizers: Shlomo Argamon, Jussi Karlgren, Jimi Shanahan
   
   HOW something is expressed, as opposed to WHAT is expressed is a many-faceted and elusive, yet intuitively important and patent characteristic of human linguistic expression. This workshop will discuss issues in the automatic analysis and extraction of stylistic variation of natural language texts -- especially but not exclusively addressing concerns related to information access. Major questions include: Style in Theory: What is style? Style in Engineering: How is style analyzable? Style in Applications: What tasks can stylistic information be used for? Style in Research: What tools and resources do you use, and can we use them too?