SIR’11: Information Retrieval Over Query Sessions

Research in Information Retrieval has traditionally focused on serving the best results for a single query. Real users, however, often begin an interaction with a search engine with a sufficiently under-specified query that they will need to reformulate before they find either the thing or every thing they are looking for. Early studies on web search query logs showed that half of all Web users reformulated their initial query: 52% of the users in 1997 Excite data set, 45% of% the users in the 2001 Excite dataset. The focus of this Workshop is the advances in Information Retrieval technology over query sessions. The Workshop is structured along two main themes:(A) algorithms that use information provided throughout query sessions for a number of tasks, ranging from ranking to query suggestion and construction of user profiles, and (B) query session detection and construction of query session collections.