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WWW2012: Special Session on CrowdSearch

16-20 April 2012, Lyon, France

For more information about WWW2012, check out the website.

Special Session on 'CrowdSearch: CrowdSourcing Web search':

Link analysis, that has shaped Web search technology in the last decade, can be seen as a massive mining of crowd-secured reputation associated with pages. With the exponential increase of social engagement, link analysis is now complemented by other kinds of crowd-generated information, such as multimedia content, recommendations, tweets and tags, and each person can ask for information or advices from dedicated sites. With the growth of online presence, we expect questions to be directly routed to informed crowds. At the same time, many kinds of tasks - either directly used for search or indirectly used for enriching content to make it more searchable - are explicitly crowd-sourced, possibly under the format of games. Many such tasks can be used to craft information, e.g. by naming and tagging data objects and by solving representational ambiguities and conflicts, thereby enhancing the scope of searchable objects. Thus, social engagement is empowering and reshaping the search of Web information.

CrowdSearch is targeted to enabling, promoting and understanding individual and social participation to search. It addresses important research questions, such as: How can search paradigms make use of social participation? Will keyword-based search seamlessly adapt to social search, or instead will new models of interaction emerge? Should social interaction be stimulated by curiosity, games, friendship or other incentives? Is there a “crowdsearching etiquette” to be used when engaging friend or expert communities? Should new sources of information be socially scouted?  Which are the mechanisms that may be used to improve or reshape search results based upon social ranking? How do social ranking models compare to advertising? Will social interaction solve the problems of data integration? What is the role of semantics, and can it help CrowdSearch?

The workshop aims at gathering researchers from different fields to debate about the various concepts, approaches, architectural choices and technical solutions for opening information search to the active participation of human beings. The key idea is that human beings should be actively involved in different stages of the search and their actions should be composed and intermixed with those of computers to get the best possible search results.

Topics of interest

The topics of interest for this workshop include (but are not limited to):
•    Large-scale knowledge discovery, content enrichment and quality assessment with the support of humans and communities. 
•    Models for task crowdsourcing and game creation for information augmentation, integration, extraction, classification, and retrieval.
•    Software models, architectures, and tools for combining information management with human and social computations.
•    Throughput, processing time, and results quality optimization of queries that involve both data and human sources. 
•    Incentive mechanisms for engaging users in tasks and games, either individually or cooperatively within social networks.
•    Techniques for identifying and mitigating spam and abuse in crowd search tasks.
•    Approaches for measuring the effectiveness and quality of human and social applications for information retrieval and their empirical assessment.
•    Human and social computation in multimedia content processing for search.
•    Use cases and applications of human-assisted information retrieval.
•    Role of crowd search in “big data” applications. 
•    User models and human factors in task design for crowdsourced search applications, e.g., cognitive bias, bounded rationality, understanding the boundaries between search questions and spam, etc.

Registration will be open to all WWW 2012 attendees.

For more information about the special session, check out the website.