Previous analysis of real query logs shows that the intention of more than half of Web queries is to find a particular entity, find entities of a particular type, or find values of a particular attribute of an entity. This problem of entity retrieval, or more generally, semantic search, has received increasing research attention from the Information Retrieval (IR) and Semantic Web communities, using text (e.g., webpages) and structured data (e.g., RDF, Wikidata), respectively. This hybrid of unstructured and structured retrieval is appealing to researchers and practitioners in the areas of IR, Database, Semantic Web, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This workshop series is a venue to bridge different communities and develop a renewed interest. It provides a platform where interdisciplinary studies of entity retrieval and semantic search can be presented, and focused discussions can take place.

We also organize two shared tasks related to entity retrieval, in order to assess strengths and weaknesses of existing systems, compare performance of techniques, and enhance communication among researchers and developers.

Theme and Topics

We welcome contributions related to any aspect of entity retrieval and semantic search, including theories, algorithms, experiments, and applications. Relevant topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Retrieval models and ranking
  • Models for entity retrieval and semantic search
  • Entity and fact ranking
  • Entity filtering and recommendation
  • Context-based ranking and filtering of entities and facts
  • Indexing entity-centered semantic data
• Retrieval at the Web and big data scale
  • Entity discovery and Web data crawling
  • Entity linking and information extraction
  • Entity matching and data integration
  • Semantic search engines
• Queries and query analysis
  • Entity-related query understanding
  • Entity-related query reformulation
  • Entity-related query suggestion
  • Entity-related query log analysis
• User behavior and interfaces (proactive or reactive presentations)
  • User models for entity retrieval and semantic search
  • Interactive and personalized semantic search
  • Entity summarization and information/knowledge cards
  • Visualization of semantic data
  • Knowledge exploration applications
• Domain-specific applications
  • Local, mobile, and enterprise semantic search
  • Social networks in semantic search
  • Multimedia semantic search
  • Semantic search for domains and applications

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically, as PDF formatted using the ACM camera-ready templates; please use sample-sigconf.tex as the template. Submissions are reviewed in a single-blind manner. Papers should be submitted through the EYRE '18 online submission system.

• Full research, empirical-study, industry papers: 6-8 pages
• Short, position, case-study, demo papers: 2-4 pages

The CIKM 2018 workshops proceedings will be published all together in the CEUR workshop series. At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to attend the workshop and present.

Important Dates

• Submission: 16 July 2018 25 July 2018 (Anywhere on Earth)
• Notification: 13 August 2018 17 August 2018
• Camera-ready: 27 August 2018 3 September 2018

Shared Tasks

We also organize two shared tasks: entity summarization and entity search. Accepted system papers will also be invited to present at the workshop.

Organizers

• Gong Cheng, Nanjing University, China
• Kalpa Gunaratna, Samsung Research America, USA
• Jun Wang, University College London, UK

Programme Committee

• Krisztian Balog, University of Stavanger
• Stefan Dietze, L3S Research Center
• Mauro Dragoni, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
• Andre Freitas, University of Manchester
• Naeemul Hassan, University of Mississippi
• Aidan Hogan, Universidad de Chile
• Evgeny Kharlamov, University of Oxford
• Krys Kochut, University of Georgia
• Kouji Kozaki, Osaka University
• Qingxia Liu, Nanjing University
• Dezhao Song, Thomson Reuters
• Marcin Sydow, Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology
• Andreas Thalhammer, Roche
• Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Wright State University
• Ondrej Zamazal, Prague University of Economics
• Xiang Zhang, Southeast University
• Lihua Zhao, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology