Workshop on Collaborative Information Retrieval
Call for Participation
Support for explicit collaboration is becoming increasingly important for certain
kinds of collection-building activities in digital libraries. In the last few years,
several research groups have pursued various issues related to collaboration during
search [1][2][3]. We can
represent collaboration in search on two dimensions—synchrony
and intent.
Synchronous, explicit search has some interesting characteristics that distinguish
it from asynchronous, implicit collaborative search (e.g., collaborative filtering,
recommendation engines). There is much more emphasis on interaction, as the system has
to not only communicate search results to users, but also mediate some forms of
communication and data sharing among its users in near real time. There are new
algorithms that need to be invented that use inputs from multiple people to produce
search results, and new evaluation metrics need to be invented that reflect the
collaborative and interactive nature of the task. Finally, we need to integrate
the expertise of library and information science researchers and practitioners by
revisiting real-world information seeking situations with an eye for explicit,
synchronous collaborative search.
The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in various
aspects of small-team collaborative search to share ideas, to stimulate research in
the area, and to increase the visibility of this emerging area. We expect to identify
promising directions for further exploration and to establish collaborative links among
research groups.
We are looking for previously-unpublished contributions in the following areas of
collaborative search:
- User Interfaces: Shared awareness, coordination, communication, interaction
design, input and display devices, etc.
- Retrieval Algorithms: Coordination of input, fusion, distribution of search
results, modified ranking algorithms, etc.
- Evaluation: Novel evaluation methodology to assess collaborative system
performance and to compare different systems, novel metrics, empirical study (qualitative
and quantitative) of potential user groups and applications, etc.
Please submit your position papers in PDF or Micorsoft Word
format. Papers should be in ACM format, and should be two to four pages long.
References
[1] Morris, M. R. and Horvitz, E. (2007) SearchTogether: an interface for collaborative web search. In Proceedings of UIST ’07, ACM Press, pp. 3-12.
[2] Pickens, J. and Golovchinsky, G. (2007) Collaborative Exploratory Search. In Proceedings of HCIR’07 Workshop, available online at http://projects.csail.mit.edu/hcir/web/hcir07.pdf
[3] Smeaton, A.F., Foly, C., Gurrin, C., Lee, H., and McGivney, S. (2006) Collaborative Searching for Video Using the Físchlár System and a DiamondTouch Table. In Proceedings of the First IEEE International Workshop on Horiztontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 151-159.
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