ESAIR 2012 - Fifth Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations for Information Retrieval

here 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 enhancing 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.
Rich Context and (Un)certainty
The ESAIR'12 workshop will have more focus than the earlier ESAIRs. While the goal remains to advance the general research agenda on this core problem, there is an explicit focus on two of the most challenging aspects to address in the coming years.
First, how to leverage the rich context currently available, especially in a mobile search scenario, giving powerful new handles to exploit semantic annotations. There is a need to avoid putting the onus for exploiting semantic annotations on the searcher by exploiting rich context of both the searcher as well as the information requested, and the mobile use case offers exactly that.
Second, we discuss the assumptions underlying information retrieval and semantic web methods head-to-head. There is a need to build new bridges between the effective statistical methods of information retrieval, and the meaningful knowledge intensive structure of linked data and the semantic web.
We Need Help!
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 one of the greatest challenges in the years to come. We envision a lively and interactive workshop, with the explicit aim to push the boundaries and think outside the box.