Preliminary CFP: IRJ intents and diversity

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

Submissions due: Apr 2, 2012
Final accept/reject decisions: July 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 Diversity
in Document Retrieval Workshop. 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
tackles 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 conclude toward 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

Apr 02, 2012 Submissions due
May 21, 2012 First-round reviews sent to authors
Jun 18, 2012 Revised manuscripts due
Jul 31, 2012 Final decisions sent to authors

SUBMISSIONS

Detailed instructions will be announced later this year.
Manuscripts must adhere to the format guidelines shown in the
"Instructions for Authors" page available from
http://springer.com/10791 .

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.

Cartoons on the Wall

My cartoons on a wall of the new MSRA building

Norwegian Forest?

だいぶん前の話ですが、村上春樹氏の「雑文集」拝読しました。
おもしろかったですが、「ノルウェイの木を見て森を見ず」は
ちょっと往生際悪いと思いました。

以下、Paul McCartney - Many Years from Now by Barry Miles,
pp.270-271, Vintage, 1998 (ISBN 0-7493-8658-4) からの引用です。

(ずーっと前から言っていることなんですが。)

The same black humour crept into 'Norwegian Wood',
which ends with the girl's flat being burned.
John had begun it in February 1965 while on a
skiing holiday with Cynthia and George Martin and
his wife Judy in St Moritz in Switzerland.
When he returned, Paul came over for a writing session
in John's music room in the attic at Kenwood.
This is another example of a song more or less writing
itself, beginning with a classic Beatles play on words:
'having' a girl and being 'had'.

PAUL: I came in and he had this first stanza,
which was brilliant. 'I once had a girl, or should I
say, she once had me.' That was all he had, no title,
nothing. I said, 'Oh yes, well, ha, we're there.'
And it wrote itself. Once you've got the great idea,
they do tend to write themselves, providing you know
how to write songs. So I picked it up at the second
verse, it's a story. It's him trying to pull a bird,
it was about an affair. John told Playboy that he
hadn't the faintest idea where the title came from
but I do. Peter Asher had his room done out in wood,
a lot of people were decorating their places in
wood. Norwegian wood. It was pine really, cheap
pine. But it's not as good a title, 'Cheap Pine',
baby. So it was a little parody really on those
kind of girls who when you'd go to their flat there
would be a lot of Norwegian wood. It was completely
imaginary from my point of view but in John's it
was based on an affair he had. This wasn't the
décor of someone's house, we made that up. So she
makes him sleep in the bath and then finally in the
last verse I had this idea to set the Norwegian
wood on fire as revenge, so we did it very tongue
in cheek. She led him on, then said, 'You'd better
sleep in the bath.' In our world the guy had to
have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I
lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn't the
décor of her house wonderful? But it didn't, it
meant I burned the fucking place down as an act
of revenge, and then we left it there and went
into the instrumental.

George had become very interested in Indian
music and it was his first sitar solo. It's in
waltz tempo 3/4 time, it's a quirky song, like
and Irish folk song; John liked that, we liked
that. So it ended up on the session with George's
sitar on it. It's 60-40 to John because it's John's
idea and John' tune. But I filled out lyrically and
had the idea to set the place on fire, so I take
some sort of credit. And the middle was mine,
those middle eights, John never had his middle
eights.

まず、最後の段落にあるとおり、
Norwegian WoodはJohn Lennonの曲ではなく、あくまで
Lennon/McCartneyの曲です。
（ただし曲毎の貢献度についての二人の主張はたまに
食い違います。人間ですから。）
そして上記はPaul自身による説明です。
他人がこれ以上の深読みをしてもあまり意味はないでしょう。

「ノルウェイの森」が素敵なタイトルであることに
間違いはありませんが、
じゃあ"Norwegian Wood"→「ノルウェイの森」が
誤訳でないかというと、やっぱり誤訳でしょう。
別に誤訳でいいんじゃないでしょうか。
「ノルウェイ木材の室内装飾」の歌や本には、
私はあんまり魅力を感じません。

My important dates 2011 version 3

May 01 NTCIR-9 INTENT Chinese topics released
May 17 NTCIR-9 1CLICK run submissions due
May 17 CIKM abstracts due
May 17 NTCIR-9 INTENT Japanese topics released
May 23 NTCIR-9 1CLICK formal run nuggets (tentative version) released
May 24 CIKM papers due
May 30 SIGIR camera ready

Jun 10 5pm Beijing Time NTCIR-9 INTENT Chinese runs due
Jun 12 CIKM paper assigned to Senior PC
Jun 13 NTCIR-9 1CLICK feedback on formal run nuggets due
Jun 14 CIKM paper assigned to reviewers
Jun 18 IPSJ TOD editorial board meeting [Tokyo]
Jun 22 FIT acceptance notification

Jun 24 5pm Beijing Time NTCIR-9 INTENT Japanese runs due
Jun 19-24 ACL [Portland]

Jul 01 NTCIR-9 1CLICK nugget match evaluation begins
Jul 04 FIT camera ready
Jul 05 CIKM reviews due
Jul 08 CIKM discusions due
Jul 10 CIKM Senior PC recommendations due
Jul 19 CIKM paper acceptance
Jul 24 SIGIR doctoral consortium mentoring
Jul 24-28 SIGIR [Beijing]
Jul 26 CIKM poster acceptance

Aug 02-03 IPSJ SIG-IFAT/DBS [Ritsumeikan U]

Aug 04 WSDM abstracts due
Aug 11 WSDM papers due
Aug 16 CIKM camera ready
Aug 22 NTCIR-9 INTENT results released
Aug 31 NTCIR-9 1CLICK nugget match evaluation ends

Sep 07-09 FIT [Hakodate]
Sep 08 NTCIR-9 1CLICK formal run results released
Sep 20 NTCIR-9 first draft papers due

Oct 26 WSDM acceptance
Oct 25-28 CIKM [Glasgow]

Nov 01 WWW abstracts due
Nov 04 NTCIR-9 camera ready
Nov 07 WWW papers due
Nov 08-13 IJCNLP [Chiang Mai, Thailand]

Dec 06-09 NTCIR-9 [Tokyo]

Jan 30, 2012 WWW notification
Feb 28, 2012 WWW camera-ready
Apr 16-20, 2012 WWW 2012

More photos from the ECIR2011 workshops

All photos by Makoto Kato.

Panel at the Session IR workshop,

with Steve Robertson, Kal Jarvelin and Mark Sanderson.

Keynote at the Diversity in Document Retrieval workshop:

advertising NTCIR.