Information Retrieval Over Query Sessions

Research in Information Retrieval has traditionally focused on serving the best results for a single query. But users often begin an interaction with a search engine with a sufficiently ill-specified query that they will need to reformulate their query and/or information need several times before they find what they are looking for. This workshop will focus on advances in Information Retrieval technology over query sessions. We aim to provide discussion and promote research & development on two main themes: (A) retrieval models & ranking, and (B) evaluation & test collections that model users interacting with engines over sessions of reformulations.

(A) Retrieval Models & Ranking: How to analyze/model/predict user interactions and use these findings to improve retrieval performance? How can we adapt ranking/retrieval models and IR theory in the light of a sequence of user interactions.

(B) Evaluation & Test Collections: How can we evaluate retrieval system performance over entire query sessions? How can we build reusable test collections to study this IR task? How can we model/simulate user interactions over a session?