These proceedings contain the contributed papers of the Seventh Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval (ESAIR 2014), held at CIKM 2014 in Shanghai, on November 7, 2014. After successful workshops at ECIR'08 in Glasgow, WSDM'09 in Barcelona, CIKM'10 in Toronto, CIKM'11 in Glasgow, CIKM'12 at Maui, and CIKM'13 in San Francisco, this year's workshop will remain to advance the general research agenda on this core problem, with an explicit focus on one of the most challenging aspects to address in the coming years. The main remaining challenge is on the user's side---the potential of rich document annotations can only be realized if matched by more articulate queries exploiting these powerful retrieval cues---and a more dynamic approach is emerging by exploiting new forms of query autosuggest. How can the query suggestion paradigm be used to encourage searcher to articulate longer queries, with concepts and relations linking their statement of request to existing semantic models? How do entity results and social network data in "graph search" change the classic division between searchers and information and lead to extreme personalization---are you the query? How to leverage transaction logs and recommendation, and how adaptive should we make the system? What are the privacy ramifications and the UX aspects---how to not creep out users?
These and other related questions will be discussed at this open format workshop -- the aim is to provide paths for further research to change the way we understand information access today!
The workshop will consist of three main parts:
Two keynotes to help us frame the problem, and create a common understanding of the challenges: Peter Mika (Yahoo Labs) and Silviu-Petru Cucerzan (Microsoft Research).
A boaster and poster session with 11 papers selected by the program committee from 15 submissions (a 73% acceptance rate). Each paper was reviewed by at least two members of the program committee.
Breakout groups on different aspects of exploiting semantic annotations, with reports being discussed in the final session.
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Semantic Search at Yahoo!
Semantic search refers to a broad array of methods that aim to improve retrieval by interpreting queries beyond the traditional weighted bag of words model of document retrieval. In this talk, we will focus on the subset of these methods that rely on ...
Linking to Web Knowledge Bases and Applications to Web Search
The development and availability of Web knowledge repositories, in particular Wikipedia, as the largest, inter-linked, and up-to-the-minute encyclopedic collection, have changed remarkably not only the way in which people fulfill their informational ...
Documents Search Using Semantics Criteria
Current Information Retrieval systems generally search documents using a keywords model, which is often not expressive enough for the user. In this paper we describe some directions for improving an Information Retrieval system by letting the user ...
Towards Named-Entity-based Similarity Measures: Challenges and Opportunities
In this paper, we investigate challenges related to the adaptation of similarity measures used in the field of Information Retrieval to work with semantic features, i.e. Named Entities. The challenges to consider are numerous, including the accuracy of ...
Can Corpus Similarity-Based Self-Annotation Assist Information Retrieval?
The use of external means to annotate corpora to assist in retrieval is gaining research attention. These external means include user provided annotations, use of linkages between documents (eg. the web), use of knowledge bases such as wikipedia, etc. ...
AIDA-Social: Entity Linking on the Social Stream
Named Entity Linking (NEL) in microblogs is a challenging task due to the use of cryptic abbreviations, insufficient contextual information, and the time-varying importance of entities. We propose three techniques to target these challenges: Mention ...
A Probabilistic Concept Annotation for IT Service Desk Tickets
Ticket annotation and search has become an important research subject in the IT service desk delivery. Millions of tickets are created yearly to address business users' IT related problems. In IT service desk management, it is critical to first capture ...
Semantic Annotation with RescoredESA: Rescoring Concept Features Generated From Explicit Semantic Analysis
Concepts have been used extensively in semantic annotating. Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) is a concept feature generator, which represents text by a concept-level vector, such as a vector of Wikipedia concepts. It is also considered a human-friendly ...
Using Semantic Role Labeling to Predict Answer Types
Most question answering systems feature a step to predict an expected answer type given a question. Li and Roth \cite{li2002learning} proposed an oft-cited taxonomy to the categorize the answer types as well as an annotated data set. While offering a ...
Leverage the Associations between Documents, Subject Headings and Terms to Enhance Retrieval
Literatures in medical domain are often annotated with subject headings by professionals to help information seeking via manifesting the subjects of documents, where subject headings serve as the pivot language between documents and users. Current ...
Bringing Head Closer to the Tail with Entity Linking
With the creation and rapid development of knowledge bases, it has become easier to understand the underlying semantics of unstructured text (short or long) on the web. In this work we especially look at the impact of entity linking on search logs. ...
A Fragment-Based Similarity Measure for Concept Hierarchies and Ontologies
Despite the popularity of concept hierarchies and ontologies, such as Yahoo! Directory, a similarity measure that considers both hierarchy content and topology and is highly efficient has not yet been reached. A commonly used metric, Tree Edit Distance, ...
Exploiting Inference from Semantic Annotations for Information Retrieval: Reflections From Medical IR
The increasing amount of information that is annotated against standardised semantic resources offers opportunities to incorporate sophisticated levels of reasoning, or inference, into the retrieval process. In this position paper, we reflect on the ...
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- Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval