SIGIR WORKSHOP REPORTThe SIGIR 2007 Workshop Program
Josiane MotheIRIT, UMR5505,
Université de Toulouse, Francemothe@irit.fr

The SIGIR workshop program aims at providing a framework for exploring new areas and ideas, andfor presenting them in a less formal and possibly more focused way than the conference itself. It also
encourages interaction with contributors and/or participants from related fields. These goals havebeen fully achieved in 2007 vintage.
We received twenty workshop submissions. The number of workshop submission is increasing; itwas twelve in 2006. This shows how dynamic is the field not only in terms of submissions in themain conference (491 paper submissions at SIGIR 2007 compared to 259 paper submissions atSIGIR 2003) but also in terms of new directions and new ways to consider information retrieval.
The reviewing committee was balanced considering IR areas, geographical and gender perspectives.
All the members reviewed all the workshop submissions. Once done, they started an intensive andvery rewarding email discussion in order to rank the submissions. This ranked list was approved by
the general SIGIR Program Committee. Notification to organizers was sent more than three monthand a half before the conference.
Considering originality and novelty, possible participation, design and organization, and variety, we
selected the nine following workshops:
Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval (LR4IR 2007)
Web Information Seeking and Interaction
Plagiarism Analysis, Authorship Identification, and Near-Duplicate Detection (PAN’07)
Improving Non-English Web Searching (iNEWS07)
Multimedia Information Retrieval
Large-Scale Distributed Systems for Information Retrieval
Information Retrieval and Applications of Graphical Models (IRGM 2007)
Focused Retrieval
Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech

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Some workshops correspond to an area that is emergent in Information Retrieval such as theLearning to Rank for Information Retrieval and Plagiarism Analysis, Authorship Identification, and
Near-Duplicate Detection workshops.
Some of the workshops aim at posing a different though related issues to those explored in previous
SIGIR workshops or in the main conference. This is the case of the focused retrieval, the Improving
Non-English Web Searching, the Multimedia Information Retrieval, and the Large scale distributed
Information Retrieval workshops.
The Web Information Seeking and Interaction workshop treats a key issue for Information Retrieval,looking into its use in real life settings. On the other hand, the Information Retrieval and Applicationsof Graphical Models is a theoretically-oriented workshop.
Attendance was high, with 310 registrants overall from which 29 registered on site. It corresponds toa mean of 34 registrants per workshop; however as expected and agreed, popularity varied over theworkshops, from 98 to 13.
Workshops are also a way to foster interactions, discussions and experiences sharing among
participants with different background. As in recent years, 2007 workshops play this game throughpanels, brainstorming and role-playing activities, and group lunch.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the workshop program committee who selected the nine
workshops held in conjunction with SIGIR as well as all the reviewers who help the organizers todecide the presentations to be part of their workshop program. “Peer review is crucial to scholarly
publication, but it is also the most time-intensive step. Reviewers are asked to volunteer their time toread and write critical and constructive reviews and this takes time”1. I also thank the localorganization staff for having been always prompt to answer our questions and find a response toindividual workshop requirements.
Finally, I would like to encourage you to submit a workshop to future SIGIR. I do believe this is agreat opportunity to foster new directions in IR and to mine some more traditional ones.

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Reference:
1

G. Marchionini; T. Saracevic, J. Carroll, D. Kraft, W. Hersh, J. Mothe, J. Zobel, P. Hernon, C.
Schwartz (2007), Reviewer merits, Information Processing and Management: an International
Journal, 43(1), pp 1-2.

Links to the workshops:
Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval
Web Information Seeking and Interaction
Plagiarism Analysis, Authorship Identification,and Near-Duplicate Detection
Improving Non-English Web Searching
Multimedia Information Retrieval
Large-Scale Distributed Systems for Information
Retrieval
Information Retrieval and Applications ofGraphical Models
Focused Retrieval
Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech

http://research.microsoft.com/users/LR4IR-2007/
http://research.microsoft.com/~ryenw/wisi/
http://www.uniweimar.de/medien/webis/research/pan-07
http://rea.teimes.gr/~lazarinf/ir7w/
http://www.yr-bcn.es/events/mir2007-workshop
http://www.tel.fer.hr/lsds-ir/
http://irgm.bpiwowar.net
http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/sigirfocus/
http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/sscs

Workshop program committee:
Peter Anick (Yahoo!, US)
Peter Bruza (University of Queensland, Australia)
Tat-Seng Chua (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
Kalervo Jarvelin (University of Tampere, Finland)
Gareth Jones (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Gina-Anne Levow (University of Chicago, US)
Josiane Mothe (Université de Toulouse, France)
Jian-Yun Nie (Université de Montréal, Canada)
Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow, UK)

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