We organize a workshop on Heterogeneous Information Access hosted by the 8th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining on 6 February 2015 in Shanghai, China
Invited speakers: Mounia Lalmas (Yahoo) and Milad Shokouhi, (Microsoft Research)
Information access is becoming increasingly heterogeneous. Especially when the user's information need is for exploratory purpose, returning a set of diverse results from different resources could benefit the user. For example, when a user is planning a trip to China on the Web, retrieving and presenting results from vertical search engines like travel, flight information, map and Q2A sites could satisfy the user's rich and diverse information need. This heterogeneous search aggregation paradigm is useful in many contexts and brings many new challenges.
Aggregated search and composite retrieval are two in- stances of this new heterogeneous information access paradigm. They are applied on the Web with heterogeneous vertical search engines. This paradigm can be useful in many other scenarios: a user aims to re-find comprehensive information about his query in his personal search (emails, slides); or a user searches and gathers different nugget information (e.g. an entity) from a set of RDF Web datasets (e.g., DBpedia, IMDB, etc.); or the user searches a set of different files (e.g., images, documents) in a peer-to-peer online file sharing systems.
This is an emerging area as different services provided are becoming more heterogeneous and complex. Therefore, there are a number of directions that might be interesting for the research and industrial community. How to select the most relevant resources and present them concisely in order to best satisfy the user? How to model the complex user behaviour in this search scenario? How can we evaluate the performance of these systems? Those are a few key interesting research questions to study for heterogeneous information access.
The workshop topics of interest are within the context of heterogeneous information access. They include but are not limited to:
- User modeling for Heterogeneous Information Access, Personalization
- Metrics, measurements, and test collections
- Optimization: Resource and vertical selection, Result presentation and diversification
- Applications: Aggregated/Federated search, Composite retrieval, Structured/Semantic search, P2P search
The workshop includes invited talks by leading researchers in the field from both industry and academia, presentations by contributed submissions as well as organized and open discussion on heterogeneous information access.
More information at: http://hia-workshop.com/.