-------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht --------
Betreff: [computational.science] CFP -- ATIR: Workshop on Axiomatic Thinking for Information Retrieval and Related Tasks @ SIGIR 2017
Datum: Wed, 19 Apr 2017 17:26:53 +0200
Von: Stefano Mizzaro <mizzaro@uniud.it>
An: computational.science@lists.iccsa.org


Call For Papers (with apologies for multiple copies)

ATIR: Workshop on Axiomatic Thinking for Information Retrieval and 
Related Tasks
Co-located with ACM SIGIR 2017
August 11, 2017. Tokyo, Japan

Workshop Website: https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~hfang/ATIR.html

Motivation

The goal of the proposed workshop is to bring together researchers and 
practitioners interested in applying axiomatic analysis to all kinds of 
IR and IR-related problems, including particularly both those interested 
in developing retrieval models and those interested in developing 
evaluation measures, and to enable them to share their findings (both 
positive or negative), to present their latest research results, and to 
discuss future directions.

Theme

As the title of the workshop suggested, the general theme of the 
workshop will be about all aspects of applications of axiomatic thinking 
to solve IR and IR-related problems. The basis of this general theme is 
the recent growth of work on applying axiomatic thinking to analyze and 
improve both retrieval models and evaluation metrics, which we expect to 
continue. The existing work has clearly demonstrated many advantages of 
axiomatic thinking, including particularly specific theoretical results 
in the form of novel constraints to be satisfied by retrieval functions 
or evaluation metrics and improved models or evaluation metrics. 
However, much more research is still needed in multiple directions.

Opportunities of applying axiomatic thinking also go beyond analyzing 
the basic retrieval functions; in fact, understanding constraints is 
also beneficial to many IR tasks that use machine learning techniques. 
Instead of having a designer carefully choose a set of assumptions to 
make when designing a formal model, these approaches use machine 
learning to weight items in a pool of features derived from many 
retrieval heuristics. However, this potentially results in a bloated 
backend which computes many features irrelevant to the task or 
collection. Having knowledge about relevant features would help slim 
down backends and speed learning and ranking. An important strength of 
the axiomatic methodology is that evaluation data sets become resources 
used to check motivated hypotheses instead of optimization mechanisms, 
which are at risk of overfitting. There are even more opportunities for 
new research on applying axiomatic thinking to evaluation as has already 
been happening where researchers have done axiomatic analysis of metrics 
for tasks such as text categorization, clustering, and ranking.

In general, an understanding of how to apply axiomatic thinking to IR 
problems may become increasingly important as information retrieval 
continues to broaden into new areas. New tasks often require new 
constraints, and an understanding of these constraints can provide 
guidance on how to adapt existing methods or how to develop new methods 
for the new tasks. For example, domain-specific IR tasks such as medical 
record search might require new retrieval constraints that can capture 
the domain knowledge.

The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from a 
broader community to exchange research ideas and results and to foster 
collaborations across subcommunities. Some of the specific topics we 
envision to be covered by the workshop theme include, but not limited to:

  - What constraints are effective to improve retrieval performance 
independent of the underlying model?
  - What constraints were expected to be useful but have not been 
effective in practice? Why not?
  - In the case of evaluation metrics, why some metric constraints do 
not affect the system comparison or the user satisfaction?
  - How can we potentially unify the axiomatic analysis of IR models 
and evaluation metrics given that both lines of work aim at formally 
modeling relevance?
  - Have new languages, media, or domains suggested new constraints for 
established domains?
  - To what extent is a valid constraint in one domain also valid in 
other domains? More generally, which constraints for retrieval methods 
or evaluation metrics are core ones, and which constraints are highly 
scenario dependent?
  - How can axiomatic thinking be combined with machine learning 
techniques to learn more effective retrieval functions?

Planned Activities

  - Keynote talk
  - Panel
  - Presentations of papers

Paper Submission

We solicit papers describing research work related to the above theme. 
In addition to the innovative methods with promising results, we also 
welcome papers reporting negative results.

Papers need to be:

  - 4 or 10 pages
  - In ACM format
  - Submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=atir2017

Formal proofs can be added as additional material. The submissions are 
not anonymous.

Important Dates

  - Submission deadlines: May 27 (for long paper) and June 3 (for short 
papers)
  - Review due: June 20
  - Notification: June 30

Workshop Organizers

  - Enrique Amigo
  - Hui Fang
  - Stefano Mizzaro
  - ChengXiang Zhai

-- 

Prof. Stefano Mizzaro, PhD
Department of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics
University of Udine
Via delle Scienze, 206 - 33100 Udine, Italy
mizzaro@uniud.it - http://www.dimi.uniud.it/mizzaro/
Ph.: +39 0432 558456 - Fax: +39 0432 558499


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