Workshops
Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story) (Sunday, Full Day)
Website: https://text2story24.inesctec.pt
Over these past years, significant breakthroughs, led by Transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs), have been made in understanding natural language text. However, the ability to capture, represent, and analyze contextual nuances in longer texts is still an elusive goal, let alone the understanding of consistent fine-grained narrative structures in text. In the seventh edition of the Text2Story workshop, we aim to bring to the forefront the challenges involved in understanding the structure of narratives and in incorporating their representation in well-established frameworks, as well as in modern architectures (e.g., transformers) and AI-powered language models (e.g, chatGPT) which are now common and form the backbone of almost every IR and NLP application. It is hoped that the workshop will provide a common forum to consolidate the multi-disciplinary efforts and foster discussions to identify the wide-ranging issues related to the narrative extraction task.
Organisers: Ricardo Campos (INESC TEC; University of Beira Interior, Portugal), Alípio Mário Jorge (INESC TEC; University of Porto, Portugal), Adam Jatowt (University of Innsbruck, Austria), Sumit Bhatia (Media and Data Science Research Lab, Adobe, India), Marina Litvak (Shamoon Academic College of Engineering, Israel)
Knowledge-Enhanced Information Retrieval (KEIR) (Thursday, Full Day)
Website: https://keirworkshop.github.io
Pretrained language models (PLMs) are generating significant impact across a wide spectrum of artificial intelligence domains, including natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR) and recommendation systems (RecSys). Concurrently, knowledge graphs (KGs) provide a structured way of storing knowledge about the real world. These KGs enhance PLMs by infusing external knowledge, which in turn enhances inference and interpretability. However, despite the remarkable progress in PLMs and KGs, current IR systems still exhibit certain weaknesses. Indeed, traditional IR systems, including retrieval and recommendation systems, often encounter challenges in addressing semantic nuances, context relevance, and handling domain-specific intricacies, leading to imprecise results. To bridge these gaps, we propose the Knowledge-Enhanced Information Retrieval workshop (KEIR @ ECIR 2024) as a platform to discuss innovative approaches that integrate external knowledge, aiming to enhance the effectiveness of information retrieval in a rapidly evolving technological landscape. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry to discuss various aspects of knowledge-enhanced information retrieval, including models, techniques, data collection and evaluation.
Organisers: Zaiqiao Meng (University of Glasgow, UK), Shangsong Liang (MBZUAI, UAE), Xin Xin (Shandong University, China), Gianluca Moro (University of Bologna, Italy), Evangelos Kanoulas (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Emine Yilmaz (University College London, UK)
Reducing Online Misinformation through Credible Information Retrieval (ROMCIR) (Sunday, Full Day)
Website: https://romcir.disco.unimib.it
In the realm of the Social Web, we are continuously surrounded by information pollution, posing significant threats to both individuals and society as a whole. Instances of false news, for instance, wield the power to sway public opinion on matters of politics and finance. Deceptive reviews can either bolster or tarnish the reputation of businesses, while unverified medical advice may steer people toward harmful health practices. In light of this challenging landscape, it has become imperative to ensure that users have access to both topically relevant and truthful information that does not warp their perception of reality, and there has been a surge of interest in various strategies to combat disinformation through different contexts and multiple tasks. The purpose of the ROMCIR Workshop, for some years now, is precisely that of engaging the Information Retrieval community to explore potential solutions that extend beyond conventional misinformation detection approaches. Key objectives include integrating information truthfulness as a fundamental dimension of relevance within Information Retrieval Systems (IRSs), achieving early detection of misinformation, and ensuring that the search results retrieved are not only truthful but also explainable to the users of IRSs. Moreover, it is essential to evaluate the role of generative models such as Language Models (LLMs) in inadvertently amplifying misinformation problems, and how they can be used to support IRSs.
Organisers: Marinella Petrocchi (National Research Council (CNR – IIT), Italy), Marco Viviani (University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy)
Information Retrieval for Understudied Users (IR4U2) (Sunday, Full Day)
Website: https://ir4u2workshop.wixsite.com/ir4u2
Information Retrieval (IR) remains an active, fast-paced area of research. Nevertheless, the majority of advancements in this domain have primarily favored what we might term ‘conventional’ users, such as English-speaking adults. We envision the 1st Workshop on Information Retrieval for Under studied Users (IR4U2) as a forum to spotlight efforts that, while sparse, consider diverse, and often understudied, user groups when designing, developing, assessing, and deploying the IR technologies that directly impact them. The main goals for IR4U2 are: (1) raising awareness about ongoing efforts focused on IR technologies designed for and used by often understudied user groups, (2) identifying challenges and open issues impacting this area of research, (3) igniting discussions to identify common frameworks for future research, and (4) cross-fertilization and community-building by sharing lessons learned gathered from research catering to different audiences by researchers and (industry) practitioners across various disciplines.
Organisers: Maria Soledad Pera (Web Information Systems – TU Delft, The Netherlands), Federica Cena (University of Turin, Italy), Theo Huibers (Universit`a della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland), Monica Landoni (Universit`a di Genova, Italy), Noemi Mauro (University of Twente, The Netherlands), Emiliana Murgia (University of Turin, Italy)
Graph-Based Approaches in Information Retrieval (IRonGraphs) (Sunday, Full Day)
Website: https://irongraphs.github.io/ecir2024
In the ever-evolving landscape of information retrieval, harnessing the power of graph-based approaches has emerged as a transformative force. Graph theory, which has long been among the backbones of computer science and data analysis, is becoming crucial within personalization and search domains, especially with the recent widespread research on Knowledge Graphs and Graph Neural Networks. These models offer a versatile set of techniques and tools that enhance information retrieval’s effectiveness and relevance. They leverage the power of interconnected data to provide users with more accurate, context-aware, and personalized search results and recommendations. The First International Workshop on Graph-Based Approaches in Information Retrieval (IRonGraphs 2024) serves as a pivotal venue where researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts from diverse backgrounds converge to explore and discuss the integration of graph-based methodologies into information retrieval.
Organisers: Ludovico Boratto (University of Cagliari, Italy), Daniele Malitesta (Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy), Mirko Marras (University of Cagliari, Italy), Giacomo Medda (University of Cagliari, Italy), Cataldo Musto (University of Bari, Italy), Erasmo Purificato (Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany)
Search Futures (SearchFutures) (Sunday, Full Day)
Website: https://searchfutures.github.io
The field and community of Information Retrieval (IR) are changing and evolving in response to the latest developments and advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and research culture. As the field and community re-oriented and re-consider its positioning within computing and information sciences more generally — it is timely to gather and discuss more seriously our field’s vision for the future — the challenges and threats that the community and field faces — along with the bold new research questions and problems that are arising and emerging as we re-imagine search. This workshop aims to provide a forum for the IR community to voice and discuss their concerns and pitch proposals for building and strengthening the field and community.
Organisers: Leif Azzopardi (University of Strathclyde, UK), Charlie Clarke (University of Waterloo, Canada), Paul Kantor (Rutgers University, USA), Bhaskar Mitra (Microsoft Research, Canada), Johanne Trippas (RMIT University, Australia), Zhaochun Ren (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Open Web Search (WOWS) (Thursday, Full Day)
Website: https://opensearchfoundation.org/wows2024
The web is an important resource for many services and applications. However, only a few large organizations have the computational and technical capabilities to process the web at scale. The First International Workshop on Open Web Search (WOWS) aims to promote and discuss ideas and approaches to open up the web search ecosystem so that small research groups and young startups can leverage the web to foster an open and diverse search market. Therefore, the workshop has two calls: (1) for scientific contributions, and (2) for open-source implementations that support collaborative and open web search engines. The first call aims for scientific contributions to building collaborative search engines, including collaborative crawling, collaborative search engine deployment, collaborative search engine evaluation, and collaborative use of the web as a resource for researchers and innovators. The second call aims to gather open-source prototypes and gain practical experience with collaborative, cooperative evaluation of search engines and their components using the TIREx Information Retrieval Evaluation Platform.
Organisers: Sheikh Mastura Farzana (German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany), Maik Fröbe (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany), Michael Granitzer (University of Passau, Germany), Gijs Hendriksen (Radboud University, The Netherlands), Djoerd Hiemstra (Radboud University, The Netherlands), Martin Potthast (Leipzig University and ScaDS.AI, Germany), Saber Zerhoudi (University of Passau, Germany)
Augmented Intelligence in Technology-Assisted Review Systems (ALTARS) (Thursday, Full Day)
Website: https://altars2024.dei.unipd.it
Technology-assisted review (TAR) systems use a kind of human-in-the-loop approach where classification or ranking algorithms (or both) are continuously trained according to the relevance feedback from expert reviewers, until a substantial number of the relevant documents are identified. In this third edition of the ALTARS workshop, we will invite researchers to discuss the issues related to the shortage of test collections for the evaluation of TAR systems and how to facilitate the creation of such datasets and to ensure that TAR systems are fine-tuned to meet the high-recall retrieval requirements of tasks like electronic discovery and medical systematic reviews. The main goal of this edition of the workshop will be to focus on both the theoretical aspects of the evaluation of the different definitions of the effectiveness of TAR systems and the implementation aspects of building such systems. We encourage participants to share their thoughts and source code to discuss also the issues related to reproducible experiments.
Organisers: Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio (University of Padova, Italy), Evangelos Kanoulas (Informatics Institute University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Prasenjit Majumder (DAIICT, India)
Geographic Information Extraction from Texts (GeoExT) (Sunday, Full Day)
Website: https://geo-ext.github.io/GeoExT2024
A wealth of unstructured textual content contains valuable geographic insights. This geographic information holds significance across diverse domains, including geographic information retrieval, disaster management, and spatial humanities. Despite significant progress in the extraction of geographic information from texts, numerous unresolved challenges persist, ranging from methodologies, systems, data, and applications to privacy concerns. This workshop will serve as a platform for the discourse of recent breakthroughs, novel ideas, and conceptual innovations in this field.
Organisers: Xuke Hu (German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany), Ross Purves (University of Zurich, Switzerland), Ludovic Moncla (University of Lyon, INSA, CNRS, UCBL, LIRIS, UMR, France), Jens Kersten (German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany), Kristin Stock (Massey University, New Zealand)
Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) (Sunday, Full Day)
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/bir-ws/bir-2024
The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval workshop series (BIR) at ECIR goes into its 14th iteration. In this workshop, we will tackle issues related to academic search, at the intersection between Information Retrieval and Bibliometrics. We strive to get the ‘retrievalists’ and ‘citationists’ active in both academia and industry together, who are developing search engines and recommender systems for scholarly search. An overview of the BIR/BIRNDL workshop series can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/bir-ws/home.
Organisers: Ingo Frommholz (University of Wolverhampton, UK), Philipp Mayr (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany), Guillaume Cabanac (University of Toulouse; Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), France), Suzan Verberne (Leiden University, The Netherlands)