Our research communities are remarkably scattered. For an outsider it must seem obvious that information science (IS), information retrieval (IR), humancomputer interaction (HCI) and natural language processing (NLP/HLT) go hand in hand. However, there is surprisingly little overlap between these communities, perhaps best illustrated by conducting a simple citation analysis of the papers published at the top annual conferences in each area which reveals that there is little cross-disciplinarity. Going deeper into the research conducted in each discipline we nd that even the basic assumptions to access and utilise information vary from one eld to another, e.g. while researchers in IR tend to start with the \bag-of-words" assumption, a researcher in NLP would never dare doing something like this; while information scientists often face structured documents that need to be accessed (e.g. digital libraries), such structures must rst be acquired from a database of images created in a lifelogging scenario before any access is possible, and so on.
Users have started to become centre-stage of information access research even within the IR community (as illustrated by a substantial number of relevant papers presented at SIGIR 2013) but there is still a long way to go to identify and employ information systems that incorporate both state-of-the-art methods for information access, search, navigation as well as human computer interaction and user experience (one just needs to pick a few randomly selected university library catalogues as evidence). The reaCopyright c 2014 for the individual papers by the paper's authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. In: U. Kruschwitz, F. Hopfgartner and C. Gurrin (eds.): Proceedings of the MindTheGap'14 Workshop, Berlin, Germany, 4-March-2014, published at http://ceur-ws.org son we identi ed the iConference as the best place to organise the workshop is that the urge to integrate the user in the information access process is deeply integrated in the research conducted by some of the best known iSchool research groups, e.g. the idea of human-computer information retrieval developed by Gary Marchionini (UNC) and human-centered information retrieval identi ed by Nick Belkin (Rutgers). Some of these ideas have sparked a lot of interest in working at the interface between di erent disciplines and this has also been demonstrated by newly established conferences such as IiiX (Information Interaction in Context) and a ected some of the primarily technical evaluation e orts in the IR community such as the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) series, in particular the Interactive track and the Session track. Nevertheless, the majority of the researchers in the di erent elds remain ignorant of what is going on outside their main topics of interest and that is partly because there is no appropriate forum to bring these ideas together and discuss them. Ultimately the idea is to create a forum where researchers from di erent communities feel at home and exchange ideas for future research directions. 2
We issued a Call for Papers asking for submissions of position papers as well as novel research papers and posters/demos addressing problems at the interface of IS, IR, HCI and NLP listing these topics as a general guideline:
Each submitted paper was peer-reviewed by four members of the programme committee consisting of experts drawn from the di erent communities guaranteeing a mix of industrial and academic backgrounds. All accepted papers have received at least two supportive reviews (i.e. the reviewer selected accept or weak accept in their overall recommendation).
The accepted papers are grouped in two categories, technical papers and position papers, based on both the type of submission as well as the suggestions received by the reviewers. 3
We are particularly grateful to the keynote speakers: Nick Belkin (Rutgers University), Miguel MartinezAlvarez (Signal) and Toine Bogers (Aalborg University Copenhagen). The way in which they bridge the gaps between di erent research communities in their work highlights the range of areas that can bene t, be it Interactive IR (Belkin), the interface between IR and Recommender Systems (Bogers) or the practical application of a range of IR and NLP methods in industry applications (Martinez-Alvarez). 4
We greatly acknowledge the e orts of the members of the programme committee, namely:
Leif Azzopardi, University of Glasgow (UK)
Birger Larsen, Aalborg University (Denmark)
Max Wilson, University of Nottingham (UK) We thank all PC members, keynote speakers as well as authors of accepted papers for working with us on making MindTheGap'14 in Berlin possible.