CfP: SIGIR 2010 Workshop on Query Representation and Understanding --- Deadline extended to June, 10

[Michael B.]

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*** Please note the extended submission deadline! ***
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Call For Papers
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Query Representation and Understanding Workshop at the 33rd Annual ACM
SIGIR Conference (SIGIR 2010)

Geneva, Switzerland, July 23, 2010
http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/sigir2010/qru/

SUBMISSIONS DUE *JUNE 10, 2010*
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Understanding the user's intent or information need that underlies a
query has long been recognized as a crucial part of effective
information retrieval. Despite this, retrieval models, in general,
have not focused on explicitly representing intent, and query
processing has been limited to simple transformations such as stemming
or spelling correction. With the recent availability of large amounts
of data about user behavior and queries in web search logs, there has
been an upsurge in interest in new approaches to query understanding
and representing intent.

This workshop has the goal of bringing together the different strands
of research on query understanding, increasing the dialogue between
researchers working in this relatively new area, and developing some
common themes and directions, including definitions of tasks and
evaluation methodology. We hope the workshop could bring together
researchers from IR, ML, NLP, and other areas of computer and
information science who are working on or interested in this area, and
provide a forum for them to identify the issues and the challenges, to
share their latest research results, to express a diverse range of
opinions about this topic, and to discuss future directions.

We solicit short position and research papers that would be presented
as posters during the workshop. Relevant topics include, but are not
limited to:
* Models and algorithms for query understanding and representing
user intent
* Empirical studies on user behavior and different types of
queries
* Applications or user scenarios using query understanding and
modeling
* New retrieval models or systems incorporating query representation
and query understanding
* Evaluation methodologies for various query processing tasks

The workshop will include invited talks, poster session and panel
discussions.

Submission
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We solicit research papers, position papers or papers that describe
research in progress to be presented as posters. Submitted papers
should be in the ACM Conference style (for LaTeX, use the "Option 2"
style) and should be 2-4 pages in 9 point font. Papers must be
submitted in PDF electronically via the submission page (https://
cmt.research.microsoft.com/QRU2010/). Submissions of papers should not
substantially duplicate work that any of the authors have published
elsewhere or have submitted in parallel to any other conferences or
journals. All submissions must be in English and will be reviewed by
at least three members of the program committee. At least one author
of each accepted paper will be expected to attend and prepare a poster
as well as a short presentation at the workshop.

Important Dates
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Deadlines for workshop poster submissions are:
Submissions Due: June 10, 2010
Acceptance Notification: June 30, 2010
Camera-ready Submission: July 10, 2010
Workshop: July 23, 2010

Organizing Committee
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Bruce Croft and Michael Bendersky, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Hang Li and Gu Xu, Microsoft Research Asia

Program Committee
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Claudia Hauff, University of Twente
Dou Shen, Microsoft
Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Yahoo Research
Hema Raghavan, Yahoo Labs
Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow
Jian-Yun Nie, University of Montreal
Kaushik Chakrabarti, Microsoft Research
Kevyn Collins-Thompson, Microsoft Research
Matt Lease, UT, Austin
Nan Sun, NUS, Singapore
Oren Kurland, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology
Pu-Jen Cheng, National Taiwan University
Ruihua Song, Microsoft Research Asia
Steven M. Beitzel, Illinois Institute of Technology
Yuanhua Lv, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Yumao Lu, Yahoo Labs