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Call for Papers:

Information Retrieval ( http://springer.com/10791 ) Special Issue on Search Intents and Diversification



Submissions due: May 14, 2012

Submissions due: May 21, 2012 (EXTENDED IN RESPONSE TO AUTHOR REQUESTS)

Final accept/reject decisions: August 31, 2012

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MOTIVATION AND BACKGROUND



Information retrieval users have diverse search needs, and the level of

detail given in the user's search query can differ widely depending on how

clear the underlying information need itself is, the user's search

environment (e.g. input device), and how difficult it is for the user to

express the need in the form of a query. For these reasons, many queries

are ambiguous and/or underspecified.



In light of this, research in accommodating different search intents has

received a lot of attention lately. For example, major conferences like

SIGIR, WWW and WSDM have begun to see papers on search result

diversification, which aims to capture different user needs within one

entry-point search result page.

This problem was discussed intensively at the ECIR 2011 and WSDM 2012

Diversity in Document Retrieval Workshops. Also, starting at TREC 2009, the

TREC Web and Blog tracks have measured the diversity of participating

systems in retrieving web pages and blog posts, respectively. Moreover, the

recent INTENT task at NTCIR-9 tackled not only search result

diversification but also the task of mining intents given a query.



As the third round of the TREC web diversity track and the first round of

the NTCIR INTENT task

concluded near the end of 2011, we believe that the timing is right for a

special issue on search

intents and diversification to be published in 2012, in order to highlight

the advances and clarify the

future goals in this area. We welcome relevant submissions from these

evaluation venues as well as from

outside.





SCOPE



We encourage submissions that are related to one or more of the following

themes:



- Intent and diversity related tasks at TREC, NTCIR and other IR evaluation

venues

- Interpreting and mining search intents

- Handling navigational and informational search intents

- Handling ambiguity and multiple facets in queries

- Handling novelty/redundancy and diversity

- Building intent and diversity related test collections

- Diversification in non-traditional IR tasks, e.g. aggregated search,

exploratory search and session IR

- Interfaces for presenting diversified search results

- Evaluation methods for intent and diversity





IMPORTANT DATES



May 14, 2012 Submissions due

May 21, 2012 Submissions due

Jun 30, 2012 First-round reviews sent to authors

Jul 27, 2012 Revised manuscripts due

Aug 31, 2012 Final decisions sent to authors





SUBMISSIONS



Manuscripts must adhere to the format guidelines shown in the

"Instructions for Authors" page available from

http://springer.com/10791 .



To submit your manuscript, please go to

http://www.editorialmanager.com/inrt

and select "SI: Search Intents and Diversification" for the article type.





GUEST EDITORS



Tetsuya Sakai tesakai at microsoft.com

Noriko Kando kando at nii.ac.jp

Craig Macdonald craig.macdonald at glasgow.ac.uk

Ian Soboroff ian.soboroff at nist.gov



Please contact the guest editors if you have any questions.





PROGRAMME COMMITTEE



Rakesh Agrawal, Microsoft Research

Javed Aslam, Northeastern University

Ben Carterette, University of Delaware

Olivier Chapelle, Yahoo! Labs

Charlie Clarke, University of Waterloo

Evangelos Kanoulas, University of Sheffield

Mounia Lalmas, Yahoo!

Hang Li, Microsoft

Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow

Filip Radlinksi, Microsoft

Davood Rafiei, University of Alberta

Stephen Robertson, Microsoft

Ian Ruthven, University of Strathclyde

Rodrygo Santos, University of Glasgow

Jun Wang, University College London

William Webber, University of Melbourne

Emine Yilmaz, Microsoft,

ChengXiang Zhai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Min Zhang, Tsinghua University