CFP - Workshop on novel methodologies for evaluation in IR

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 [email protected]



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.






Mark Sanderson
Reader in Information Retrieval

Room 225, Dept. of Information Studies
University of Sheffield, Regent Court
Portobello St, Sheffield, S1 4DP, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 114 22 22648, Fax: +44 (0) 114 27 80300
mailto:[email protected], http://dis.shef.ac.uk/mark/

Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement