• Submission deadline: January 22, 2018
• Review due: February 12, 2018
• Acceptance Notification Date: February 21, 2018
• Camera-ready copies: March 5, 2018
• Workshop: March 26, 2018

Prof. Udo Kruschwitz, University of Essex

Keynote 1:Users2Story - On the Importance of Understanding Searchers’ Information Needs

Abstract: Uncovering the storyline of events can be of interest for numerous reasons. For example, looking at it through information retrieval glasses (with a touch of personalisation), one might want to string together the various search requests and browsing patterns of an individual user to understand what this user might be after, what information needs are actually hidden behind those queries with the aim of offering better information access support. We all know what interesting stories can actually be derived like this as illustrated by the analysis of the AOL query logs, and the "AOL search data leak” also demonstrates the problems with privacy when analysing user’s Web search logs. If however we move from a Web search scenario to a professional search scenario such as search within an organisation, then we note that privacy issues turn out to be much less of a problem. At the same time, it becomes even more desirable to capture the search and browsing patterns of users because finding information in this context can be very difficult and without understanding the user it can become a very frustrating exercise for the searcher trying to find the document(s) relevant for the task at hand. The talk will explore this use case in some detail and in the best case will be seen as a different take on the main theme of the workshop (and in the worst case will be judged as “off topic” with no chance of re-invitation).

Bio: Udo Kruschwitz is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex. His main research interest is the interface between information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). Professor Kruschwitz has successfully led research projects developing algorithms to turn unstructured and partially structured textual data into structured knowledge and user/cohort models that have been applied in a variety of applications including search, navigation and summarisation. He has furthermore been involved as PI and Co-I in successful joint university/industry projects that turned NLP and IR research into practical commercial applications, for example as PI on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project with Signal Media. The collaboration won the Best Knowledge Transfer Partnership Project of the Year Award at InnovateUK's 'Best of the Best 2015' event, and another KTP project with Signal Media has just started.

Prof. Eric Gaussier, University of Grenoble Alps

Keynote 2:Word embeddings, information retrieval and textual entailment

Abstract: Word embeddings currently are one of the preferred representation for words in various NLP and IR tasks. In this talk, we will review the main embeddings used in IR and see to which extent they lead to improved IR performance. We will also discuss the possibility to extend current word embeddings with syntactic information and see the impact of doing so on several NLP tasks.

Bio: Prof. Eric Gaussier is known for his work on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science (DS), in particular for his contributions on models and algorithms to extract information, insights and knowledge from data in various forms. He has worked on three main subfields of AI and DS: machine learning, information retrieval and computational linguistics. He is also interested in modeling how (textual) information is shared in social (content) networks, and how such networks evolve over time. More recently, He has also been working on improving job scheduling techniques through machine learning, and in learning representations for different types of sequences, as texts and Time series.

Slides are available here and pictures taken during the event are available here.

09:30 – 09:40:	Introduction
09:40 – 10:30:	[slides] Keynote 1: Users2Story - On the Importance of Understanding Searchers’ Information Needs (Udo Kruschwitz)
11:00 – 11:30:	Coffee break
11:00 – 11:30:	[slides] Gossip is more than just story telling Topic modelling and quantitative analysis on a spontaneous speech corpus (Boróka Pápay, Bálint Kubik and Júlia Galántai)
11:30 – 12:00:	[slides] Analyzing Shift in Narratives Regarding Migrants in Europe via Blogosphere (Muhammad Nihal Hussain, Kiran Kumar Bandeli, Samer Al-Khateeb and Nitin Agarwal)
12:00 – 12:30:	[slides] IREvent2Story: A Novel Mediation Ontology and Narrative Generation (Venumadhav Kattagoni and Navjyoti Singh)
12:30 – 13:00:	Poster Session
13:00 – 14:30:	Lunch break
14:30 – 15:30:	[slides] Keynote 2: Word embeddings, information retrieval and textual entailment (Eric Gaussier)
15:30 – 16:00:	[slides] Text network analysis and visualization of Hungarian, communist-era political reports (Attila Gulyás, Martina K. Szabó, István Boros Jr. and Gergő Havadi)
16:00 – 16:30:	Coffee break
16:30 – 16:50:	[slides] Measuring Character-based Story Similarity by Analyzing Movie Scripts (O-Joun Lee, Nayoung Jo and Jason Jung)
16:50 – 17:10:	[slides] Job Recommendation based on Job Seeker Skills: An Empirical Study (Jorge Valverde-Rebaza, Ricardo Puma, Paul Bustios and Nathalia C. Silva)
17:10 – 18:00:	Demo showcase