Overview

Professional search in specific domains has been addressed in IR research over the last decades. Although each domain (e.g. legal, medical, academic, governmental) has its own idiosyncrasies, professional search tasks have specific requirements in common that are different from requirements of generic web search engines. These requirements follow directly from the context and needs of professional searchers: Searchers in different domains often exhibit particular search behavior different from general Web search. These unique behavioral patterns can be both a nature of the profession as well as a result of using a particular professional search tool.

This workshop will address the specific requirements for professional search from multiple angles; covering many different facets of professional search in an interactive setting where researchers work with input from information professionals to their mutual benefit. The workshop will deliver a roadmap of research directions for the years to come.

CFP

We invite submissions of research papers and position papers with a maximum length of four pages ACM style. Please anonymize your paper; the reviewing process will be double blind. The selection of papers is based on relevance, quality and diversity. The workshop is also open for papers presenting work in progress and challenges of new projects. The proceedings will be published as CEUR workshop proceedings.

List of topics:

• supporting exploratory search and complex,high-value search tasks;
• the collection and analysis of information needs in professional search domains;
• comparison of search needs, approaches and behavior patterns across different professions;
• the evaluation of longitudinal, recall-oriented tasks;
• multi-faceted evaluation of professional search tasks;
• analysis of session log data for complex search tasks;
• beyond the search engine result page: browsing, reading, analyzing and using retrieval results;
• personalization and information recommendation for professional search;
• search applications in a professional context (such as enterprise search, e-discovery and email search);
• the evaluation and improvement of specialized search tools in working environments;
• distributed and federated search in professional search environments;
• multi-modal and multi-lingual search in professional environments.

EasyChair submission link.

Important Dates

• May 7, 2018: Workshop papers due
• May 25, 2018: Workshop papers notification
• July 12, 2018: Workshop day

Program

Workshop schedule

Keynote speakers

• Paul Bennett, Microsoft Research “Search and Recommendation in the Enterprise”

Paul Bennett is the Principal Research Manager of the Information & Data Sciences group in Microsoft Research AI. His published research has focused on a variety of topics surrounding the use of machine learning in information retrieval - including ensemble methods and the combination of information sources, calibration, consensus methods for noisy supervision labels, active learning and evaluation, supervised classification and ranking, crowdsourcing, behavioral modeling and analysis, and personalization. Some of his work has been recognized with awards at SIGIR, CHI, and ACM UMAP as well as an ECIR Test of Time Honorable Mention award. Prior to joining MSR in 2006, he completed his dissertation in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon with Jaime Carbonell and John Lafferty. While at CMU, he also acted as the Chief Learning Architect on the RADAR project from 2005-2006 while a postdoctoral fellow in the Language Technologies Institute.

• David D. Lewis “Research Challenges in IR for Legal Discovery and Investigations “

David D. Lewis, Ph.D. is Chief Data Scientist at Brainspace, A Cyxtera Business. He leads the data science team developing new information retrieval, machine learning, and natural language processing technologies for legal, investigatory, and intelligence applications. He is a Fellow of the American Society for the Advancement of Science, and won a Test of Time Award from SIGIR in 2017 for his 1994 paper introducing the uncertainty sampling algorithm for active learning.

Paper presentations

First session:

• Girish Palshikar, Rajiv Srivastava, Mahek Shah and Sachin Pawar: Automatic Shortlisting of Candidates in Recruitment
• Tamer Mohamed Abdellatif, Luiz Fernando Capretz and Danny Ho: Searching for Relevant Lessons Learned Using Hybrid Information Retrieval Classifiers: A Case Study in Software Engineering
• Nimesh Ghelani, Gordon Cormack and Mark Smucker: Refresh Strategies in Continuous Active Learning

Second session:

• Thomas Schoegje, Toine Pieters and Egon van den Broek: Personalizing professional search: plans for supporting authentic work tasks (position paper)
• Piyush Arora, Murhaf Hossari, Alfredo Maldonado, Clare Conran, Gareth J. F. Jones: Challenges in the development of effective systems for Professional Legal Search
• Suzan Verberne: Explainable IR for personalizing professional search (position paper)

Proceedings

The workshop proceedings have been published online at ceur-ws.org/Vol-2127.

Organisation

PC members

Allan Hanbury, Charlie Hull, David Elsweiler, Diane Kelly, Elaine Toms, Farhad Shokraneh, Jaap Kamps, Julie Glanville, Krisztian Balog, Laura Dietz, Martin White, Michail Salampasis, Mihai Lupu, Norbert Fuhr, Peter Cotroneo, Ray Daley, Rene Spijker.

Organisers

• Jiyin He, Signal Media, UK
• Udo Kruschwitz, University of Essex, UK
• Birger Larsen, Aalborg University, Denmark
• Tony Russell-Rose, 2dSearch, Guildford, UK
• Suzan Verberne, Leiden University, the Netherlands
• Arjen P. de Vries, Radboud University, the Netherlands

Contact

profs2018@easychair.org