Workshop on Task-based Information Search Systems

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This award provides support for the "Workshop on Task-based Information Search Systems", to be held March 14-15, 2013 in Chapel Hill, NC with the goal to discuss challenges of designing a new generation of information search systems that go beyond simple searches and can support people in resolving a underlying need or task. While contemporary search engines are good at helping people resolve simple look-up tasks, they are not as useful in helping people engaged in more complex tasks whose resolution might require multiple search sessions and multiple search strategies. Most search environments are tailored to support a small set of basic search tasks and provide searchers with few options to search and interact with information, and little to help them synthesize and integrate information across session. Participants of the workshop, leading researchers in interactive information retrieval from academia and industry will discuss challenges of incorporating task models into systems and tools to support complex, multi-search and multi-session tasks. The goal of this workshop is to enumerate, discuss, and document these issues into a research agenda that can help guide work in this field. Specifically, this workshop is focusing on the following topics: (1) identification, elicitation, modeling and tracking of tasks, processes and states, including the identification of frameworks for conceptualizing task and relevance models; (2) creation of task-specific and task-aware search environments, including the development of interfaces, tools, features, indexing techniques and search algorithms; and (3) development of methods and measures for studying user behavior and evaluating task-based search systems, including session-based measures. The workshop will outline directions for short, mid-, and long-term research, seed interdisciplinary and international collaborations and generate a unified and multidisciplinary bibliography for researchers and students interested in working in this area. Workshop will include junior and underrepresented attendees in order to broaden participation in computer science. Workshop results will be summarized in a report that will be disseminated via the workshop web site (http://ils.unc.edu/taskbasedsearch) and various publications. In addition, it is expected that general users of search tools will benefit from resulting advances in technology that will provide better tools and services to support task-based retrieval across multiple search sessions.