NMEIR 2008

CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on novel methodologies for evaluation in information retrieval At ECIR, 2008

OBJECTIVES Information retrieval is an empirical science; the field cannot move forward unless there are means of evaluating the innovations devised by researchers. However the methodologies conceived in the early years of IR and used in the campaigns of today are starting to show their age and new research is emerging to understand how to overcome the twin challenges of scale and diversity.

Scale The methodologies used to build test collections in the modern evaluation campaigns were originally conceived to work with collections of 10s of thousands of documents. The methodologies were found to scale well, but potential flaws are starting to emerge as test collections grow beyond 10s of millions of documents. Support for continued research in this area is crucial if IR research is to continue to evaluate large scale search.

Diversity With the rise of the large Web search engines, some believed that all search problems could be solved with a single engine retrieving from a one vast data store. However, it is increasingly clear that evolution of retrieval is not towards a monolithic solution, but instead to a wide range of solutions tailored for different classes of information and different groups of users or organizations. Each tailored system on offer requires a different mixture of component technologies combined in distinct ways and each solution requires evaluation.

This workshop calls for research papers (max 8 pages) to be submitted on topics that address evaluation in Information Retrieval. Topics will include but are not limited to: �?� test collection building for diverse needs �?� new metrics and methodologies �?� evaluation of multilingual IR and/or multimedia IR systems �?� novel evaluation of related areas, such as QA or summarization �?� evaluation of commercial systems �?� Novel forms of user-centered evaluation

Papers will be peer reviewed by members of the workshop Programme Committee. A preliminary list of the PC members is

Paul Clough             University of Sheffield Franciska de Jong      University of Twente Thomas Deselaers        RWTH Aachen University Norbert Fuhr            University of Duisburg Gareth Jones            Dublin City University Jussi Karlgren          Swedish Institute of Computer Science Bernardo Magnini        ITC-irst Paul McNamee            Johns Hopkins University Henning Müller          University & University Hospitals of Geneva Stephen Robertson       Microsoft Research Tetsuya Sakai           National Institute of Informatics

SUBMISSION Papers will be submitted as PDFs in ACM SIG Proceedings format

http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates

Submit final versions of paper to m.sanderson@shef.ac.uk

IMPORTANT DATES Submission date Monday 4 February Notifications by 20 February Final copy by 3 March.

WORKSHOP ORGANISERS AND CONTACT DETAILS: The Workshop Chair is Mark Sanderson. Co-organisers are Martin Braschler, Nicola Ferro and Julio Gonzalo.

The workshop will be sponsored by Treble-CLEF, a Coordination Action under 7FP which will promote R&D, evaluation and technology transfer in the multilingual information access domain. This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP