ECIR 2011 - ECIR 2011 Workshop Information Retrieval Over Query Sessions

Information Retrieval Over Query Sessions

http://ir.cis.udel.edu/ECIR11Sessions/

Important Dates

* 21st February, 2011: Papers due *** EXTENDED

* 11th March, 2011: Notification of Acceptance

* 24th March, 2011: Camera-Ready papers due

* 18th April, 2011: IRoQS-2011 Workshop, Dublin, Ireland

Topic

Research in Information Retrieval has traditionally focused on serving
the best results for a single query. But users often begin an
interaction with a search engine with a sufficiently ill-specified
query that they will need to reformulate their query and/or
information need several times before they find what they are looking
for. This workshop will focus on advances in Information Retrieval
technology over query sessions. We aim to provide discussion and
promote research & development on two main themes:

(A) Retrieval Models & Ranking: How to analyze/model/predict user
interactions and use these findings to improve retrieval performance?
How can we adapt ranking/retrieval models and IR theory in the light
of a sequence of user interactions.

(B) Evaluation & Test Collections: How can we evaluate retrieval
system performance over entire query sessions? How can we build
reusable test collections to study this IR task? How can we model/
simulate user interactions over a session?

Technical original research papers and position papers (5 pages LNCS)
on each of these two topics are invited for submission on or before
21st February 2011.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):
Evaluation of Sessions:

* Effectiveness metrics

* Simulating interactions

* Test collections

* Using live labs and interactive evaluation

Retrieval Models and Ranking for Sessions:

* Query analysis/repesentation/intent/suggestion

* Ranking models (language models, probabilistic retrieval
models, feature- based models, learning to rank)

* Personalised search (user analysis)

* Applications

Submission Instructions
Submissions should report new (unpublished) research results, or
ongoing research. Both technical paper submissions and position
papers, of up to 5 pages including references, will be orally
presented. All paper submissions must be written in English following
the LNCS author guidelines.

Organisers

* Ben Carterette, University of Delaware

* Evangelos Kanoulas, University of Sheffield

* Paul Clough, University of Sheffield

* Mark Sanderson, RMIT University