Beyond Single-shot Text Queries: Bridging the Gap(s) between Research Communities (MindTheGap’14) Udo Kruschwitz Frank Hopfgartner Cathal Gurrin CSEE DAI Labor School of Computing University of Essex Technische Universität Berlin Dublin City University United Kingdom Germany Ireland udo@essex.ac.uk frank.hopfgartner@tu-berlin.de cgurrin@computing.dcu.ie 1 Motivation son we identified the iConference as the best place to organise the workshop is that the urge to integrate Our research communities are remarkably scattered. the user in the information access process is deeply For an outsider it must seem obvious that informa- integrated in the research conducted by some of the tion science (IS), information retrieval (IR), human- best known iSchool research groups, e.g. the idea of computer interaction (HCI) and natural language pro- human-computer information retrieval developed by cessing (NLP/HLT) go hand in hand. However, there Gary Marchionini (UNC) and human-centered infor- is surprisingly little overlap between these communi- mation retrieval identified by Nick Belkin (Rutgers). ties, perhaps best illustrated by conducting a simple Some of these ideas have sparked a lot of interest in citation analysis of the papers published at the top an- working at the interface between different disciplines nual conferences in each area which reveals that there and this has also been demonstrated by newly estab- is little cross-disciplinarity. Going deeper into the re- lished conferences such as IiiX (Information Interac- search conducted in each discipline we find that even tion in Context) and affected some of the primarily the basic assumptions to access and utilise information technical evaluation efforts in the IR community such vary from one field to another, e.g. while researchers in as the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) series, in IR tend to start with the “bag-of-words” assumption, particular the Interactive track and the Session track. a researcher in NLP would never dare doing something Nevertheless, the majority of the researchers in the like this; while information scientists often face struc- different fields remain ignorant of what is going on tured documents that need to be accessed (e.g. digital outside their main topics of interest and that is partly libraries), such structures must first be acquired from because there is no appropriate forum to bring these a database of images created in a lifelogging scenario ideas together and discuss them. Ultimately the idea before any access is possible, and so on. is to create a forum where researchers from different Users have started to become centre-stage of infor- communities feel at home and exchange ideas for fu- mation access research even within the IR commu- ture research directions. nity (as illustrated by a substantial number of rele- vant papers presented at SIGIR 2013) but there is 2 Workshop Scope still a long way to go to identify and employ infor- mation systems that incorporate both state-of-the-art We issued a Call for Papers asking for submissions of methods for information access, search, navigation as position papers as well as novel research papers and well as human computer interaction and user experi- posters/demos addressing problems at the interface of ence (one just needs to pick a few randomly selected IS, IR, HCI and NLP listing these topics as a general university library catalogues as evidence). The rea- guideline: • Interactive IR Copyright c 2014 for the individual papers by the paper’s au- thors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. • Adaptive IR This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. In: U. Kruschwitz, F. Hopfgartner and C. Gurrin (eds.): Pro- • Recommender Systems ceedings of the MindTheGap’14 Workshop, Berlin, Germany, 4-March-2014, published at http://ceur-ws.org • Novel methods to access to digital libraries • User studies • Klaus Schoeffmann, Klagenfurt University (Aus- tria) • User/group profiling • Pavel Serdyukov, Yandex (Russia) • Lifelogging • Jialie Shen, Singapore Management University • Multimedia information access (Singapore) Each submitted paper was peer-reviewed by four • Ryen White, Microsoft Research (USA) members of the programme committee consisting of experts drawn from the different communities guaran- • Max Wilson, University of Nottingham (UK) teeing a mix of industrial and academic backgrounds. All accepted papers have received at least two support- We thank all PC members, keynote speakers as well ive reviews (i.e. the reviewer selected accept or weak as authors of accepted papers for working with us on accept in their overall recommendation). making MindTheGap’14 in Berlin possible. 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 re- ceived by the reviewers. 3 Keynotes We are particularly grateful to the keynote speakers: Nick Belkin (Rutgers University), Miguel Martinez- Alvarez (Signal) and Toine Bogers (Aalborg University Copenhagen). The way in which they bridge the gaps between different research communities in their work highlights the range of areas that can benefit, be it Interactive IR (Belkin), the interface between IR and Recommender Systems (Bogers) or the practical appli- cation of a range of IR and NLP methods in industry applications (Martinez-Alvarez). 4 Acknowledgements We greatly acknowledge the efforts of the members of the programme committee, namely: • Leif Azzopardi, University of Glasgow (UK) • Paul Clough, University of Sheffield (UK) • Martin Halvey, Glasgow Caledonian University (UK) • Hideo Joho, University of Tsukuba (Japan) • Evangelos Kanoulas, Google (Switzerland) • Jussi Karlgren, Gavagai (Sweden) • Birger Larsen, Aalborg University (Denmark) • Jochen Leidner, Thomson Reuters (UK) • Gary Marchionini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA) • Doug Oard, University of Maryland (USA) • Alan Said, CWI (The Netherlands)