SPIRE 2009 Workshop on task-based information access

SPIRE 2009 Workshop on task-based information access

August 28, Saariselkä

The SPIRE 2009 Information Retrieval workshop, arranged immediately after the 16th String Processing and Information Retrieval Symposium in Saariselkä, Lapland, aims to bring together information retrieval researchers with an interest in task-based information retrieval and the impact that task characteristics have on information access. Tasks vary across domain, usage situation, user community makeup, real-time requirements, cost issues and numerous other factors. Especially in professional contexts, the challenges posed by the characteristics of the task may be a dominant factor in deciding the appropriate design for an information management system. These characteristics are often (although not always) described through use cases.

The aim of the workshop is to chart and discuss what kinds of special requirements and challenges different tasks and use scenarios and different target data (e.g. bio- and health, financial analysis, patent and intellectual property tasks, marketing and brand management, security and monitoring) pose on information retrieval engines and evaluation. Any combination of questions such as (and not limited to) can be addressed:

• How will a task-based approach affect information retrieval and information system design?
• How will addressing user needs affect IR systems?
• How will the handling of non-standard data affect IR systems?
• How can special domains and tasks be described: (e.g. patent retrieval, bio/gene retrieval, security, marketing etc.)?
• How can evaluation of IR systems be informed by the task context?
• Specifically, in the context of SPIRE, how can applications of string processing such as approximate string matching be useful for specific tasks in IR?

We hope that you'll consider joining us! Participation will be free including lunch and refreshments, courtesy of SICS - if you plan on attending, please send us email to help us plan the day. If you are willing to give a brief talk, include a position statement of no more than two to four pages. We will then send a program out to participants. Please feel free to forward this message to anyone that might be interested in attending the workshop.

Position papers from the speakers will be collated and distributed at the workshop, and published as a SICS technical report. One of the aims of the workshop will be to investigate the possibility of authoring a joint state-of-the-art journal paper on the topic of task-based information access.

We haven't set a hard deadline for the position papers. We will consider each paper as soon as we receive it and we are encouraging the potential participants to submit their contributions (to anni at sics.se) as soon as possible. Of course, we will need some time for settling the program of the workshop and for informing the participants, so we would prefer receiving everything by mid August.