ESAIR 2014 - Seventh Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations for Information Retrieval

There 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 increasing 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.
The main remaining challenge is on the user's side, and a more dynamic approach is emerging by exploiting new forms of query autosuggest. The potential of rich document annotations can only be realized if matched by more articulate queries exploiting these powerful retrieval cues. How can the query suggestion paradigm be used to encourage searcher to articulate longer queries, with concepts and relations linking their statement of request to existing semantic models? How do entity results and social network data in "graph search" change the classic division between searchers and information and lead to extreme personalization -- are you the query? How to leverage transaction logs and recommendation, and how adaptive should we make the system? What are the privacy ramifications and the UX aspects -- how to avoid creeping out users?
Many Open Questions
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 a range of open questions:
Application/Use Case: What are use cases that make obvious the need for semantic annotation of information? What tasks cannot be solved by document retrieval using the traditional bag-of-words? What is keeping searchers from exploring these powerful search request? What impact has the web of data with more and more information in preprocessed form?
Annotations: What types of annotation are available? Are there crucial differences between author-, software-, user-, and machine-generated annotations? Do we annotate types/classes/categories ("person") or instances ("Albert Einstein")? How similar or different are linked data and annotated text? What are the limitations of the current annotations schemes, and how to overcome them?
Rich Context: Do we annotate text? Or also search requests and interactions, and their broader context? Besides personalization and geo-positional information, mobiles have a wide and growing range of locational, mechanical and even biometrical sensor data available to them. Can kick-start the query by inferring task and situational context in the mobile use case?
(Un)certainty: How should we interpret the annotations? Can we reliably link textual annotations to known entity catalogs? Can expect a messy world to be captured in a clean set of meaningful categories? Or is all information fundamentally uncertain and only partly known? How can we fruitfully combine information retrieval and semantic web approaches?
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!