ESAIR'14: Seventh International Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval

Introduction

There is an increasing amount of structure on the Web as a result of modern Web languages, user tagging and annotation, emerging robust NLP tools, and an ever growing volume of linked data. 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.

Articulate Queries and Query Auto Suggest

The goal of the ESAIR'14 was to advance the general research agenda on this core problem, with an explicit focus on two of the most challenging aspects to address in the coming years.

• First, there is a need to explore more articulate queries, with concepts and relations linking their statement of request to existing semantic models as offered by emerging knowledge bases (DBpedia, Freebase).
• Second, there is a need to extend the query suggestion paradigm to dynamically negotiate longer queries exploring powerful new aspects or facets of the underlying information need.

We Need Help!

The Workshop brought 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 hed a lively and interactive workshop, with the explicit aim to push the boundaries and think outside the box.

ESAIR'14 in action

ESAIR history

Previous ESAIR editions are found at:

• 6th ESAIR workshop, October 2013, in conjunction with CIKM 2013, San Francisco.
• 5th ESAIR workshop, November 2012, in conjunction with CIKM 2012, Maui.
• 4th ESAIR workshop, October 2011, in conjunction with CIKM 2011, Glasgow.
• 3rd ESAIR workshop, October 2010, in conjunction with CIKM 2010, Toronto.
• 2nd ESAIR workshop, February 2009, in conjunction with WSDM 2009, Barcelona.
• 1st ESAIR workshop, March 2008, in conjunction with ECIR 2008, Glasgow.

SCHEDULE

CREDITS

This workshop will be held as part of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Shanghai, 2014. Information on Shanghai can be found in the Wikipedia.