Report on the third workshop on exploiting semantic annotations in information retrieval (ESAIR)

Abstract

There is an increasing amount of structure on the Web as a result of modern Web languages, user tagging and annotation, and emerging robust NLP tools. These meaningful, semantic, annotations hold the promise to significantly enhance information access, by enhancing the depth of analysis of today's systems. Currently, we have only started exploring the possibilities and only begin to understand how these valuable semantic cues can be put to fruitful use. The workshop had an interactive format consisting of keynotes, boasters and posters, breakout groups and reports, and a final discussion, which was prolonged into the evening. There was a strong feeling that we made substantial progress. Specifically, each of the breakout groups contributed to our understanding of the way forward. First, annotations and use cases come in many different shapes and forms depending on the domain at hand, but at a higher level there are commonalities in annotation tools, indexing methods, user interfaces, and general methodology. Second, there is a framework emerging to view annotation as (1) a linking procedure, connecting (2) an analysis of information objects with (3) a semantic model of some sort, expressing relations that contribute to (4) a task of interest to end users. Third, we should look at complex tasks that cannot be comprehensible articulated in a few keywords, and embrace interaction both to incrementally refine the search request and to explore the results at various stages, guided by the semantic structure.