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We present a theoretical framework and preliminary results for manual categorization of explicit certainty information in 32 English newspaper articles. The explicit certainty markers were identified and categorized according to the four hypothesized dimensions – perspective, focus, timeline, and level of certainty. One hundred twenty one sentences from sample news stories contained a significantly lower frequency of markers per sentence (M=0.46, SD =0.04) than 564 sentences from sample editorials (M=0.6, SD =0.23), p= 0.0056, two-tailed heteroscedastic t-test. Within each dimension, editorials had most numerous markers per sentence in high level of certainty, writer’s point of view, and future and present timeline (0.33, 0.43, 0.24, and 0.22, respectively); news stories – in high and moderate levels, directly involved third party’s point of view, and past timeline (0.19, 0.20, 0.24, and 0.20, respectively). These patterns have practical implications for automation. Further analysis of editorials showed that out of 72 combinations possible under the hypothesized model, the high level of certainty from writer’s perspective expressed abstractly in the present and future time, and expressed factually in the future were very common. Twenty two combinations never occurred; and 35 had ≤ 8 occurrences. This narrows the focus for future linguistic analysis of explicit certainty markers.

We propose new visualization techniques for the user behaviors when using search engine results pages. Our visualization method provides an overview of a user’s actual visual behavior using the logs for eye-movement data and browser link-clicking. We also report on the eye-movement data collected from user experiments.

This paper gives an overview of the Web Retrieval Task that was conducted from 2001 to 2002 at the Third NTCIR Workshop. In the Web Retrieval Task, we attempted to assess the retrieval effectiveness of Web search engine systems using a common data set, and built a re-usable test collection suitable for evaluating Web search engine systems. With these objectives, we constructed 100-gigabyte and 10-gigabyte document data that were mainly gathered from the `.jp' domain. Participants were allowed to access those data only within the `Open Laboratory' located at the National Institute of Informatics. Relevance judgments were performed on the retrieved documents, which were written in Japanese or English, by considering the relationshiop between the pages referenced by hyper-links. Some evaluation measures were also applied to individual system results submitted by the participants.

During a three-day workshop in February 2012, 45 Information Retrieval researchers met to discuss long-range challenges and opportunities within the field. The result of the workshop is a diverse set of research directions, project ideas, and challenge areas. This report describes the workshop format, provides summaries of broad themes that emerged, includes brief descriptions of all the ideas, and provides detailed discussion of six proposals that were voted "most interesting" by the participants. Key themes include the need to: move beyond ranked lists of documents to support richer dialog and presentation, represent the context of search and searchers, provide richer support for information seeking, enable retrieval of a wide range of structured and unstructured content, and develop new evaluation methodologies. QC 20130129

This report constitutes the proceedings of the workshop on Information Access in a Multilingual World: Transitioning from Research to Real-World Applications}, held at SIGIR 2009 in Boston, July 23, 2009. Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) is at a turning point wherein substantial real-world applications are being introduced after fifteen years of research into cross-language information retrieval, question answering, statistical machine translation and named entity recognition. Previous workshops on this topic have focused on research and small-scale applications. The focus of this workshop was on technology transfer from research to applications and on what future research needs to be done which facilitates MLIA in an increasingly connected multilingual world.

Not only for further understanding of subjects but also for learning analytical thinking or inductive inference, it is important to provide a highly engageable environment where pupils can interact with high quality cultural contents easily. The authors have been developed an interactive exploring tool called CEAX Voyager. One of the important issues to make the learning with CEAX Voyager effective is to prepare adaptive descriptions for pupils. This paper proposes a framework for supporting creation and sharing of adaptive descriptions about cultural heritage objects. In the framework, such descriptions can be authored not only by professionals such as curators but also by school teachers.

The growth in SIGIR over the past few years has been remarkable. SIGIR 2005 saw a record 368 full paper submissions; SIGIR 2006 again set a record with 399 submissions. In our planning for 2007 we anticipated between 350 and 400 papers. Instead, we were pleasantly surprised, but somewhat overwhelmed, when we received 490 submissions, an increase of nearly 23% over 2006. From these submissions we were able to accept 84 papers (17.5%). These contributions are drawn from the breadth of IR research, including indexing, efficiency, evaluation, formal models, machine learning, classification, and user studies. Many papers are devoted to specialized topics such as question answering, multi-media retrieval, Web search and spam. Along with these full papers, we were able to accept 105 posters, 18 demonstrations, 9 tutorials and 9 workshops. In addition, 9 PhD candidates were selected to participate in our doctoral consortium.