Second International Workshop on Gami cation for Information Retrieval (GamifIR'15)

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Many research challenges in the eld of IR rely on tedious manual labour. For example, manual feedback is required to assess the relevance of documents to a given search task, to annotate documents or to evaluate interactive IR approaches. A recent trend to perform these tasks is the use of crowdsourcing techniques, i.e., obtaining relevance labels from anonymous crowd workers via an open call. Although research indicates that such techniques can be useful, they fail when motivated users are required to perform a task for reasons other than just being paid per click, document judged or time spent on the task.

A promising approach to increase user motivation is by employing gami cation methods which has been applied in various environments and for di erent purposes such as marketing, education, pervasive health care, enterprise workplaces, e-commerce, human resource management and many more. The de nition of gami cation is still under discussion, e.g., whether it covers methods \to facilitate and support the users' overall value creation"[ 3 ] or as a user experience enhancement using game design elements \regardless of speci c usage intentions, contexts [...]"[ 1 ] or environments. De nitions pursuing the increase of user experience and overall value indicate that the application of gami cation is goal-oriented. Although several studies indicate that gami cation can lead to increased user Copyright c 2015 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. activity, a detailed analysis of users' personal perception of gami cation principles has barely been studied. In the last few years, several frameworks on how to `gamify' were proposed, but there are still many open questions on how to start. We think a particular challenge of applying gami cation is to nd an elegant and subtle way of adopting and adapting game design patterns, mechanisms and elements to a particular problem or scenario.

The purpose of the GamifIR workshops was to bring together researchers and practitioners from a wide range of areas including game design, IR, humancomputer interaction, computer games, and natural language processing in order to start a discussion and an exchange of research ideas and results relating to emerging areas of gami cation within the context of IR.

The First International Workshop on Gami cation in Information Retrieval (GamifIR'14) was held at ECIR 2014 in Amsterdam (half day only). The workshop focused on the challenges and opportunities that gami cation may present for the information retrieval (IR) community [ 2 ].1 Given the interest of the rst GamifIR workshop created in the run-up of the event and the discussions emerging at the workshop, we are convinced that we are only at the start of seeing gamication becoming an established methodology to support and push forward IR in a variety of ways. This we believe - merited the organisation of a second workshop.

1A detailed review of the workshop can be found in the Spring 2014 edition of Informer, the quarterly newsletter of the BCS IRSG at http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2014/04/gamifir-2014/ The call for papers solicited submissions of position papers as well as novel research papers addressing problems related to gami cation and IR including topics such as:

Gami cation approaches in a variety of contexts, including document annotation and ground-truth generation; interface design; information seeking; user modelling; knowledge sharing

Gami cation design

Gami cation analytics

Long-term engagement Applied game principles, elements and mechanics User engagement and motivational factors of gami cation

Player types, contests, cooperative gami cation

Search challenges and gami cation

Game based work and crowdsourcing

Applications and prototypes

Each submitted paper was peer-reviewed by three members of the programme committee consisting of experts drawn from di erent communities guaranteeing a mix of industrial and academic backgrounds. In total, seven submissions were accepted. 3

Keynotes

We were very pleased that Dr Leif Azzopardi (University of Glasgow) and Dr Christian Eickho (ETH Zurich) were willing to provide keynote talks. Both of them are very well known in the Information Retrieval community with particular interests and expertise in IR games and crowdsourcing, respectively.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the e orts of the programme committee, namely:

Omar Alonso, Microsoft Research (USA)

Raian Ali, Bournemouth University (UK)

Michael Ameling, SAP (Germany) Jon Chamberlain, University of Essex (United Kingdom) Carsten Eickho , ETH Zurich (Switzerland)

Christopher G Harris, The University Of Iowa (USA)

Hideo Joho, University of Tsukuba (Japan)

Edith Law, University of Waterloo (Canada)

Till Plumbaum, TU Berlin (Germany)

Craig Stewart, Coventry University (United Kingdom) Albert Weichselbraun, University of Applied Sciences Chur (Switzerland)

We thank all PC members, keynote speakers as well as authors of accepted papers for making GamifIR'15 possible.

References

[1] S. Deterding , D. Dixon , R. Khaled , and L. Nacke . From game design elements to gamefulness: De ning \gami cation" . In Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments, MindTrek'11 , pages 9 { 15 , New York, NY, USA, 2011 . ACM.

[2] F. Hopfgartner , G. Kazai, U. Kruschwitz , and M. Meder, editors. GamifIR'14: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Gami cation for Information Retrieval , New York, NY, USA, 2014 . ACM.

[3] K. Huotari and J. Hamari . De ning gami cation: A service marketing perspective . In Proceeding of the 16th International Academic MindTrek Conference, MindTrek'12 , pages 17 { 22 , New York, NY, USA, 2012 . ACM.