Current search systems are not adequate for individuals with specific needs: children, older adults, people with visual or motor impairments, and people with intellectual disabilities or low literacy. Search services are typically created for average users (young or middle-aged adults without physical or mental disabilities) and information retrieval methods are based on their perception of relevance as well. The workshop will be the first to raise the discussion on how to make search engines accessible for different types of users, including those with problems in reading, writing or comprehension of complex content. Search accessibility means that people whose abilities are considerably different from those that average users have will be able to successfully use search systems.

The objective of the workshop is to provide a forum and initiate collaborations between academics and industrial practitioners interested in making search more usable for users in general and for users with specific needs in particular. We encourage presentation and participation from researchers working at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, ambient intelligence and related areas.

Topics

The workshop welcomes contributions on any issue concerning accessible search, for instance:

• Understanding of search behavior of users with specific needs
• Understanding of relevance criteria of users with specific needs
• Understanding the effects of domain expertise, age, user experience and cognitive abilities on search goals and results evaluation
• Non-topical aspects of relevance: text style, readability, appropriateness of language (harassment and explicit content detection)
• Development of test collections for evaluation of accessible search systems
• Collaborative search techniques for assisting users with specific needs (e.g. parents helping children)
• Potential of search personalization techniques to satisfy users with specific needs
• Search interfaces and result representation for people with specific needs
• Using assistive technologies for interaction with search systems, e.g. speech recognition or eye tracking software for querying and browsing.

Invited Speakers

The organisers are pleased to announce two invited speakers who will present at the workshop:

Dr. T.V. Raman, Senior Research Scientist at Google Labs. Dr. Raman leads the project "Google Accessible Search", helping users with impairments to find accessible Web content.

Dr. Allison Druin, Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. Since 1998, Dr. Druin has led an interdisciplinary research teams looking for ways to improve information access for children and understand their search behaviour.

Papers and Posters

The conference language is English. The workshop will be a mix of oral presentations for long papers (maximum of 8 pages), a session for posters (maximum of 2 pages) and a panel discussion. All submissions will be reviewed by at least two program committee members. Workshop proceedings will be available at the workshop.

Please, submit papers in pdf-format, using the ACM SIG Proceedings style using EasyChair

Important Dates

4 June:

Paper submission deadline (previous deadline: 23 May)

16 June:

Notification of acceptance

23 June:

Camera-ready papers due (provisional, awaiting confirmation from the SIGIR conference chairs)

23 July:

Workshop in Geneva, Switzerland

Labels: Call For Papers, Workshop