Cross-lingual Expert Search - Bridging CLIR and Social Media

CriES will be a workshop at CLEF 2010, September 20-23, Padua (Italy). As part of the workshop we will also define a pilot challenge for multi-lingual expert search.

Download the official Call for Papers.

Link to the CriES Workshop Program.

Overview paper of the CriES Pilot Challenge

This workshop addresses the problem of multi-lingual expert search in social media environments. The main topics are multi-lingual expert retrieval methods, social media analysis with respect to expert search, selection of datasets and evaluation of expert search results. We also define a pilot challenge which will help to identify problems ranging from IPR issues to result assessment.

The motivation of this workshop is defined as follows. Online communities generate major economic value and form pivotal parts of corporate expertise management, marketing, product support, CRM, product innovation and advertising. In many cases, large-scale online communities are multi-lingual by nature (e.g. developer networks, corporate knowledge bases, blogospheres, Web 2.0 portals). Nowadays, novel solutions are required to deal with both the complexity of large-scale social networks and the complexity of multi-lingual user behavior. At the same time, it becomes more and more important to efficiently identify and connect the right experts for a given task across locations, organizational units and languages. The key objective of this workshop is to consider the problem of multi-lingual retrieval in the novel setting of modern social media leveraging the expertise of individual users.

We expect the following kind of submissions:

• Description of experiments and results on the pilot expert search challenge
• Scientific papers addressing the following research questions:
  • User characterization: the use of multi-lingual evidence of social media for building expert profiles
  • Community analysis: mining of social relationships in collaborative environments for multi-lingual retrieval scenarios
  • User-centric recommender algorithms: development of retrieval and recommendation algorithms that allow for similarity search and ranked retrieval of expert users in online communities (in contrast to more common document retrieval tasks).
• Proposals of new social media datasets for cross-lingual expert search
• Analysis of problems and challenges in evaluation of cross-lingual expert search

• 04.07.2010: Submission deadline for papers
• 18.07.2010: Notification of acceptance
• 15.08.2010: Camera ready deadline

Submission to the CriES Workshop should not exceed 10 pages in Springer LNCS format. Submissions are managed on the CriES EasyChair page.

Publishing of the papers is organized by the CLEF conference:
Camera ready versions of accepted paper have to be submitted at the conference submission page. Additionally to the full paper, the submission of an extended abstract summarizing the main details and results is mandatory (no longer than 400 words).

The workshop papers will be published electronically on the CLEF website. Additionally the extended abstract will be included in the Book of Abstracts. Both workshop papers and Book of Abstracts will be assigned ISBN numbers. The papers will also be indexed by DBLP.

All information can be found on the pilot challenge page.

Important Dates:

• December 2009: Release of pilot dataset
• 16.05.2010: Submission deadline for results on pilot challenge
• 20.06.2010: Release of relevance assessments and evaluation results
• 04.07.2010: Submission deadline for papers
• 18.07.2010: Notification of acceptance
• 15.08.2010: Camera ready deadline

Main contacts:

• Philipp Sorg, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Web, Email)
• Sergej Sizov, University of Koblenz (Web, Email)

Organizing Committee:

• Philipp Cimiano, Bielefeld University (Web)
• Antje Schultz, University of Koblenz (Web)

• Eneko Agirre (IXA Research Group, University of the Basque Country, Spain)
• Krisztian Balog (Intelligent Systems Lab, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
• Paul Buitelaar (DERI Galway, Irland)
• Iryna Gurevych (Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany)
• Alberto Lavelli (Human Language Technology, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)
• Pavel Smrz (Computer Graphics and Multimedia, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic)
• Paola Velardi (University of Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy)