IR 2012 - Special Issue on Search Intents and Diversification

Information Retrieval ( http://springer.com/10791 ) Special Issue on Search Intents and Diversification
Submissions due: May 14, 2012
Final accept/reject decisions: August 31, 2012

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 and WSDM 2012
Diversity in Document Retrieval Workshops. 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 tackled 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
concluded near 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
May 14, 2012 Submissions due
Jun 30, 2012 First-round reviews sent to authors
Jul 27, 2012 Revised manuscripts due
Aug 31, 2012 Final decisions sent to authors
SUBMISSIONS
Manuscripts must adhere to the format guidelines shown in the
"Instructions for Authors" page available from
http://springer.com/10791 .
To submit your manuscript, please go to
http://www.editorialmanager.com/inrt
and select "SI: Search Intents and Diversification" for the article type.
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