xml-dev - CFP for a workshop on search results

[Jerome McDonough <jmcdonou@library.berkeley.edu>]

This may be slightly off-topic for the list, as it's not XML specific, but I
figured
there are enough people here interested in both improving online searching and
hypertext to justify passing this along.  Apologies to those who've already
got
it
in their mail queue:


=======================
Information Doors -- Where Information Search and Hypertext Link

May 30th 2000
San Antonio, Texas, USA

http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~einat/info_doors/

A workshop held in conjunction with the
ACM Hypertext conference (www.ht00.org/)
=======================

Introduction
The purpose of this workshop is to tackle the problem of creating new
hypertexts on-the-fly for representing other hypertext documents in the
context of search results.

Online search results are, no doubt, a form of hypertext created
on-the-fly. Search results pages are also probably the most frequently
seen hypertext form of writing nowadays. However, the research community
tends to identify the presentation search results with Information
Retrieval research. This workshop will consider search results as a form
of hypertext, encouraging discussion about the nature of this
dynamically created textual point-of-departure.

The task of reading from a screen is not a trivial one, nor is the task
of navigating between online texts. Even less trivial is creating a new
text to represent other texts that are interconnected. In the case of
hypertext representation of search results these tasks are combined to
create a new on-screen text that describes and links other texts or
entities. The purpose of this workshop is to tackle the problem of
creating new hypertexts on-the-fly for representing other hypertext
documents in the context of search results. The workshop will focus on
the textual aspects of the problem:

- How texts are read online?
- How previously unseen documents might be presented in text to people
  who search for information?
- How people navigate through textual search results?
- What are the informative role and value of the newly created
  intermediate page?
- Does it influence the reading of the documents followed by users?
- Does it change the focus and the meaning of the texts as they are
  perceived by readers?
- Are there any emerging textual or language conventions of presentation
  within hypertext systems and among hypertext authors that can be used
  in order to facilitate navigation through search results (e.g. naming of
  links conventions on the web, similarities in annotation patterns in
  annotation systems, use of titles and paragraph arrangements and
positioning,
use
  of lists and preferred methods of list ordering, and authors' frequent
  vocabulary choices).

The workshop aims to bring together participants from many disciplines
such as Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI), Information Retrieval (IR),
Natural Language Processing (NLP), Digital Library (DL), applied
psychology and psycho-linguistics, to discuss the nature of one of the
most frequently seen hypertext presentation in recent years -- online
search results. It will address the problem of textual presentation and
hypertext representations of search results by looking at evaluations
and studies of hypertext representations, studies about interaction with
texts, how text representations should be designed in terms of language
coherence and on-screen/online reading limitations, how to improve
navigation with a smarter choice of textual representation, etc. The
term 'textual representation' relates to how a document or a
group-of-documents is represented in text (short or long texts,
coherently summarised or organised by fixed fields like author, title,
last updated, citations, generating descriptions, extracting passages,
and so on). We will aim for gathering our knowledge to enhance and
integrate our experience about hypertext in order to improve the options
users are presented with while searching for information. The goal of
the workshop is to create an interdisciplinary community that is able to
address issues concerning search results presentation in the context of
an online hypertext system.

The workshop will specifically focus on the textual representation of
results. It will not look at graphical representations of search results
unless these shed new light on a textual issue, such as a comparison
between textual and graphical representations of documents. The
following list of suggested topics is only a short one and authors are
encouraged to add more related issues and directions of investigations
that are missing from it.

Topics

Issues of presentation
- Choosing what information to show about found entities
  (summaries, titles, links, annotations, additional related information,
  etc.)
- Grouping of results
- Labelling Groups of documents
- Creating hierarchies of results
- Comparisons between textual & graphical representations of results

Issues of results refinement
- Similarities detected between results (represented in text)
- Query refinement (textual options)

Issues of evaluation
- How results are read
- Does presentation change users navigation experience
- Different users - different presentations?
- Large scale studies
- Task-specific studies

Issues of speed and efficiency
Commercial applications


Important Dates
    Submission of papers - 5 April 2000
    Notification of acceptance - 30 April 2000
    Workshop - 30 May 2000


Submission
Papers are due on the 5th of April 2000. All papers should be submitted
electronically via email (sent to einat@ics.mq.edu.au). PDF submissions
are preferred (if this is not possible then try to send it as a .txt,
.ps or MSWord file). Papers should be no longer than 6 pages.


Workshop Organiser:
  Einat Amitay (Macquarie University & CSIRO)
  einat@ics.mq.edu.au

Committee:
  Chaomei Chen (IS & Computing, Brunel University)
  Mary Czerwinski (Microsoft)
  Andrew Dillon (SLIS, Indiana University)
  Sue Dumais (Microsoft)
  Raya Fidel (SLIS, University of Washington)
  Gene Golovchinsky (FXPAL)
  Stephen Green (Sun Microsystems)
  Christina Haas (English, Kent State University)
  Johndan Johnson-Eilola (English, Purdue University)
  Chris Manning (CS & Linguistics, Stanford University)
  Vibhu Mittal (Just Research)


Jerome McDonough -- jmcdonou@library.Berkeley.EDU  |  (......)
Library Systems Office, 386 Doe, U.C. Berkeley     |  \ *  * /
Berkeley, CA 94720-6000    (510) 642-5168          |  \  <>  /
"Well, it looks easy enough...."                   |   \ -- /  SGNORMPF!!!
         -- From the Famous Last Words file        |    ||||

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