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Call for Papers                                                Compiegne, France
OSWIR 2005 First International Workshop on                    September 19, 2005
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                    Open Source Web Information Retrieval
                         http://www.emse.fr/OSWIR05/

In conjunction with WI & IAT 2005 (http://www.hds.utc.fr/WI05/)
        the 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence &
        Intelligent Agent Technology
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The World Wide Web has grown to be a primary source of information for millions
of people. Due to the size of the Web, search engines have become the major
access point for this information. However, "commercial" search engines use
hidden algorithms that put the integrity of their results in doubt, so there is
a need for some open source Web search engines.

On the other hand, the Information Retrieval (IR) research community has a long
history of developing ideas, models and techniques for finding results in data
sources, but finding one's way through all of them is not an easy task. Moreover
their applicability to the Web search domain is uncertain.

The goal of the workshop is to survey the fundamentals of the IR domain and to
determine the techniques, tools, or models that are applicable to Web search.
Presentations should include either strong arguments or report results supported
by large-scale experiments that demonstrate the applicability of the technique
to the Web domain as well as its advantage over similar techniques.

Relevant topics include, but are not restricted to:
  . Information Retrieval Models and Matching Function Models
      - vector space, probabilistic, Boolean models and their extensions
      - passage retrieval
      - normalization
  . Utilities for IR
      - relevance feedback
      - clustering
      - indexing entities (N-grams, words, stemming, stop word removal, compound
        nouns, named entities, concepts, etc.)
      - statistical regression
      - query expansion (e.g. with thesaurus)
      - natural language processing (syntactical analysis, etc.)
      - disambiguation
  . Web (and hypertext) particulars
      - links
      - anchors
      - HTML and/or XML structure
      - document identification (URL)
      - duplicates
      - hidden documents
      - dynamic documents
      - site
  . Evaluation of models
  . User Interface
      - Query language
      - Results presentation

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Organizers
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Michel BEIGBEDER                                e-mail: mbeig@emse.fr
  Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Saint-Etienne, France
Wai Gen YEE                                     e-mail: yee@iit.edu
  Illinois Institute of Technology, USA

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How to participate
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Every interested person is invited to apply for attendance by sending either
  . a position paper concerning the recommended choice for a method (tool,
    technique, model)
  . a survey on a topic listed upward
  . a report on an experiment related to some Web characteristic (size,
    heterogeneity, multi-linguism, hyperlinks, etc.) and its relation to IR
The submission should be in IEEE CS format and its length is limited to 4 pages.
Instructions and style files for Word and Latex are available on
http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/WI05/download/
The submission has to be mailed to both organizers:
        mbeig@emse.fr   AND   yee@iit.edu

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop.

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Dates
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Papers due                                            Thursday, July 21, 2005
Notification of acceptance                            Tuesday, August 9, 2005
Final versions of papers due                          Friday, August 19, 2005
Presentation slides and questions on other            Friday, September 9, 2005
papers due
Workshop                                              Monday, September 19, 2005

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Workshop Organization
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The workshop is scheduled for a full day.

Before the workshop, each participant will have to review everyone else's paper
and highlight one main idea and write down one question about it.

In the morning, each participant will briefly present his paper and then answer
the questions collected before the workshop.  The afternoon will be dedicated to
a discussion about some of the topics raised by the presented papers and to
prepare a schedule for follow-up activities, for instance, joint research.

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Program Committee
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Michel Beigbeder, Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, France
Abdur Chowhury, America Online Search and Navigation, USA
Ophir Frieder, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
David Grossman, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
Donald Kraft, Louisianna State University, USA
Clement Yu, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Wai Gen Yee, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA

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Proceedings
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A hardcopy of the proceedings will be distributed to workshop participants.
A summary of the workshop and its follow-up activities will be published on the
web page.

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