Call for papers

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Special Issue on Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval in the Journal of Information Processing & Management.

Despite the growing number and complexity of annotated corpora, anddespite the potential impact that these may have in information retrieval (IR) tasks, annotations have not yet made a significant impact in IR research or applications.

In recent years there has been a lot of discussion about semantic
annotations of document collections. There are many forms of
annotations and many techniques that identify or extract them.
Named-entity extraction, semantic classes, microformats, RDF, and user tags are examples of such annotations. As natural language processing (NLP) tagging techniques mature, more and more annotations can be automatically extracted from free text. In particular, techniques have
been developed to ground named entities in terms of geo-codes, ISO time codes, Gene Ontology ids, etc. Furthermore, the number of collections which explicitly identify entities is growing fast with
Web 2.0 and Semantic Web initiatives.

The ESAIR'08 (http://www.yr-bcn.es/esair08) workshop brought together researchers and practitioners trying to use annotations for search in diverse fields (from databases to linguistics, multimedia retrieval, retrieval, semantic web...). It was obvious that there was a wealth of interesting research problems and applications, and increased interest from the community, and it seemed important to continue this multi-disciplinary discussion through a journal special issue and future workshops (such as ESAIR'09, http://www.yr-bcn.es/esair09).

We invite original papers addressing novel information processing and data management techniques involving semantic annotations and information retrieval. Contributions related to algorithms,
applications, tools, and practical aspects are welcome.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Semantic Web
- Semantic search
- Collaborative tagging and annotation
- Applications and tools
- Annotation and evaluation
- Classification and clustering
- Text mining
- Question answering
- User interfaces and visualization
- Time
- GIS
- Exploratory search
- Summarization

Submission Guidelines
The deadline for submissions is October 30th 2008. All contributions should be submitted through the electronic submission system of Information Processing & Management, following the journal guidelines
for authors found at:
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/infoproman

Please upload your document to be considered for the Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval Special Issue at
http://ees.elsevier.com/ipm/ and choose `Special Issue: SAIR' as the Article Type. Include an abstract, three to five keywords, and the corresponding author's e-mail address.

Guest Editors

Omar Alonso (A9.com) - oalonso@a9.com
Hugo Zaragoza (Yahoo! Research) - hugoz@yahoo-inc.com