Workshops

Reducing Online Misinformation through Credible Information Retrieval (ROMCIR 2022)

Marinella Petrocchi (IIT-CNR & IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy)
Marco Viviani
(University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy)

With the advent of the Social Web, we are constantly and more than ever assaulted by information pollution online, which is more successful as more refined are the techniques of manipulation of those who create and disseminate fake information. Different kinds of “information disorder” propagate online, and may lead to severe issues for Society. False news can, for example, guide public opinion in political and financial choices; false reviews can promote or, on the contrary, discredit economic activities; unverified medical information can lead people to follow behaviors that can be harmful to their own health (and to that of society as a whole). In this context, it becomes essential to guarantee users access to reliable information that does not distort their perception of reality. 

For this reason, in recent years, numerous approaches focusing on Natural Language Processing, Text Mining, Social Network Analysis techniques have been proposed for the identification of false information, in different contexts and for different purposes. However, the problem is still of great interest with respect to many open issues, especially related to accessing and retrieving credible information. There are still few works that have attempted to address the problem from the IR perspective, although several outstanding issues are related to it and deserve necessary investigation, such as those of the early detection of dis/misinformation, the development of solutions that can be understood by final users (explainable AI), the study of the problem in the domain-specific fields (e.g., Fintech and Consume Health Search), the relationship between security, privacy, and credibility in information access and dissemination. In this scenario, advances in Information Retrieval become crucial to investigate and solve such open issues, providing users with automatic but understandable tools to help them come into contact with genuine information.

Website: https://romcir2022.disco.unimib.it/

Fifth International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story 2022)

Ricardo Campos (INESC TEC; Ci2 – Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Portugal)
Alípio Jorge (INESC TEC; University of Porto, Portugal)
Adam Jatowt (University of Innsbruck, Austria)
Sumit Bhatia (Adobe Inc, India)
Marina Litvak (Shamoon Academic College of Engineering, Israel)

Although information extraction and natural language processing have made significant progress towards an automatic interpretation of texts,  the problem of constructing consistent narrative structures is yet to be solved. In the fifth edition of the Text2Story workshop, we aim to foster the discussion of recent advances in the link between Information Retrieval (IR) and formal narrative understanding and representation of texts. Specifically, we aim to provide a common forum to consolidate the multi-disciplinary efforts and foster discussions to identify the wide-ranging issues related to the narrative extraction task.

Website: http://text2story22.inesctec.pt/

Third International Workshop on Algorithmic Bias in Search and Recommendation (BIAS@ECIR2022)

Ludovico Boratto (University of Cagliari, Italy)
Stefano Faralli (Unitelma Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)
Mirko Marras (University of Cagliari, Italy)
Giovanni Stilo (University of L’Aquila, Italy)

Creating search and recommendation algorithms that are efficient and effective has been the main objective for the industry and the academia for years. However, recent research has shown that these algorithms lead to models, trained on historical data, that might exacerbate existing biases and generate potentially negative outcomes. Defining, assessing and mitigating these biases throughout experimental pipelines is therefore a primary step for devising search and recommendation algorithms that can be responsibly deployed in real-world applications. In this workshop, we aim to collect novel contributions in this field and offer a common ground for interested researchers and practitioners.

Website: https://biasinrecsys.github.io/ecir2022/

Augmented Intelligence in Technology-Assisted Review Systems: Evaluation Metrics and Protocols for eDiscovery and Systematic Review Systems (ALTARS 2022)

Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio (University of Padova, Italy)
Evangelos Kanoulas
(University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Prasenjit Majumder
(Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, India)

Length: half day (afternoon)

The 1st Workshop on Augmented Intelligence for Technology-Assisted Review Systems (ALTARS 2022) will focus on High-recall Information Retrieval (IR) systems which tackle challenging tasks that require the finding of (nearly) all the relevant documents in a collection.

In this workshop, we aim to fathom the effectiveness of eDiscovery systems and Systematic Review systems which is a research challenge itself. In fact, despite the number of evaluation measures at our disposal to assess the effectiveness of a “traditional” retrieval approach, there are additional dimensions of evaluation for TAR systems. For example, it is true that an effective high-recall system should be able to find the majority of relevant documents using the least number of assessments. However, this type of evaluation discards the resources used to achieve this goal, such as the total time spent on those assessments, or the amount of money spent for the experts judging the documents.

Website: http://altars2022.dei.unipd.it/

12th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2022)

Ingo Frommholz (University of Wolverhampton, UK)
Philipp Mayr
(GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany)
Guillaume Cabanac
(University of Toulouse, France)
Suzan Verberne
(Leiden University, the Netherlands)

The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval workshop series (BIR) at ECIR goes into its 12th iteration. In this workshop, held in conjunction with the  44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2022), we will tackle issues related to academic search, at the intersection between Information Retrieval and Bibliometrics. We strive to get the ‘retrievalists’ and ‘citationists’ active in both academia and the industry together, who are developing search engines and recommender systems for scholarly search.

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/bir-ws/bir-2022