DDR-2012: Diversity in Document Retrieval

Overview

When an ambiguous query is received, a sensible approach is for the information retrieval (IR) system to diversify the results retrieved for this query, in the hope that at least one of the interpretations of the query intent will satisfy the user. Diversity is an increasingly important topic, of interest to both academic researchers (such as participants in the TREC Web and Blog track diversity tasks), as well as to search engines professionals. In this workshop, we solicit submissions both on approaches and models for diversity, the evaluation of diverse search results, and on applications and presentation of diverse search results.

Workshop Themes

As diversity is, in general, am emerging topic, these is no consensus on various aspects of the topic. The primary aim of this workshop is to foster an interactive, in-depth environment with papers and attendees representing and discussing one of four workshop themes:

• Modelling Diversity - e.g. "What are the key components of diversification models?"
• Modelling Risk - e.g. "How can risk guide an effective diversification process?"
• Evaluation - e.g. "How can a better evaluation experiment for diversification be structured?"
• Applications - e.g. "What are the key applications for diversity in commercial search?"

Technical and position papers on each of these four topics are invited for submission before 5th December 2012. In the workshop program, these will be presented, before breakout sessions continue on each of the four workshop themes.

Location

DDR 2012 will be co-located with the 5th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2012) in Seattle, on 12th February 2012.

Previous Edition

This workshop follows up and complements the previous edition, DDR 2011, held in conjunction with ECIR 2011. We had two 5 position papers, 5 technical papers, and 2 invited speakers. The proceedings of DDR 2011 are available.