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

Proceedings

Proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library: see here.

Program

The program consisted of invited keynotes, short paper presentations, breakout groups, and a report out and final discussion.

Invited Speakers

• Peter Mika (Yahoo Labs), Semantic Search at Yahoo [Paper, Slides].

  Semantic search refers to a broad array of methods that aim to improve retrieval by interpreting queries beyond the traditional weighted bag of words model of document retrieval. In this talk, we will focus on the subset of these methods that rely on explicit semantic annotations, i.e. linking queries and content to items in a Knowledge Base. We will discuss techniques of entity linking on queries and documents, and the potential impact of these methods on improving performance on the classical ad-hoc document retrieval task. We will also discuss some novel tasks, including entity retrieval and related entity recommendations, and their implementation in Yahoo Search. We will close by considering some of the challenges that are specific to developing search services in a mobile context.

• Silviu-Petru Cucerzan (Microsoft Research), Linking to Web Knowledge Bases and Applications to Web Search [Paper, Slides].

The development and availability of Web knowledge bases, in particular Wikipedia, as the largest, inter-linked, and up-to-the-minute encyclopedic collection, have changed remarkably not only the way in which people fulfill their informational needs on the Web but also the way in which information can be organized and provided by Web search engines. The talk will focus on the task of entity extraction and linking to Wikipedia and other Web knowledge repositories. It will also cover applications of entity repositories in conjunction with query logs of commercial Web search engines to Web information retrieval tasks such as context-aware search, query suggestion, question answering, retrieval of support for factual statements, and automatic aggregation of topic pages as an alternative to the ten blue links.

Accepted Papers

• [Paper, Poster]. Santiago Cotelo, Alejandro Makowski, Luis Chiruzzo and Dina Wonsever. Documents Search Using Semantics Criteria
• [Paper, Poster]. Tom De Nies, Christian Beecks, Wesley De Neve, Thomas Seidl, Erik Mannens and Rik Van de Walle. Towards Named-Entity-based Similarity Measures: Challenges and Opportunities
• [Paper, Poster]. Vinay Deolalikar. Can Corpus Similarity-Based Self-Annotation Assist Information Retrieval?
• [Paper, Poster]. Yusra Ibrahim, Mohamed Amir Yosef and Gerhard Weikum. AIDA-Social: Entity Linking on the Social Stream
• [Paper, Poster]. Ea-Ee Jan, Kuan-Yu Chen and Tsuyoshi Ide. A Probabilistic Concept Annotation for IT Service Desk Tickets
• [Paper, Poster]. Zhuoren Jiang, Miao Chen and Xiaozhong Liu. Semantic Annotation with RescoredESA: Rescoring Concept Features Generated From Explicit Semantic Analysis
• [Paper, Poster]. Zuyao Li, Peter Exner and Pierre Nugues. Using Semantic Role Labeling to Predict Answer Types
• [Paper, Poster]. Jin Mao and Kun Lu. Leverage the associations between documents, subject headings and terms to enhance retrieval
• [Paper, Poster]. Manisha Verma and Diego Ceccarelli. Bringing the Head Closer to the Tail with Entity Linking
• [Paper, Poster]. Hui Yang. A Fragment-Based Similarity Measure for Concept Hierarchies and Ontologies
• [Paper, Poster]. Guido Zuccon, Bevan Koopman and Peter Bruza. Exploiting Inference from Semantic Annotations for Information Retrieval: Reflections from Medical IR

Breakout Group Reports and Final Discussion

• Academic debate on Logical Semantic Web versus Probabilistic Information Retrieval.

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.