SIGIR 2008 Workshop on Focused Retrieval (Question Answering, Passage Retrieval, Element Retrieval) 24 July 2008

INTRODUCTION

Standard document retrieval finds atomic documents, and leaves it to the end-user to locate the relevant information inside the document. Focused retrieval removes this latter task from the end user by providing more direct access to relevant information. That is, focused retrieval addresses information retrieval and not simply document retrieval. Focused retrieval has been used to extract relevant sections from academic documents; and the application to text book searching is obvious (such commercial systems already exist).

The purpose of this workshop is to raise issues and promote discussion on focused retrieval - that is, Question Answering (QA), Passage Retrieval, and Element Retrieval (XML-IR).

Papers discussing focused retrieval and related issues are sought. Topics may include but are not limited to: Theory, Experimentation, Application, Interaction, and Experience. Note that relevance ranking algorithms and system evaluations are explicitly excluded and will be rejected outright (they are the focus of the annual evaluation forums). Please refer to the call for further details.

NEWS

LOCATION

The workshop was part of SIGIR 2008 in Singapore.

SCHEDULE

CREDITS

This workshop was held as part of the 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development on Information Retrieval, Singapore, 2008. Information on Singapore can be found in the Wikipedia.