SIGIR 2013 workshop on time aware information access (#TAIA2013)

Web content increasingly reflects the current state of the physical and social world, manifested both in traditional news media sources along with user-generated publishing sites such as Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook. At the same time, web searching increasingly reflects problems grounded in the real world. As a result of this blending of the web with the real world, we observe that the web, both in its composition and use, has incorporated many of the dynamics of the real world. Few of the problems associated with searching dynamic collections are well understood, such as defining time-sensitive relevance, understanding user query behavior over time and understanding why certain web content changes.

We believe that, just as static collections often benefit from modeling topics, dynamic collections will likely benefit from temporal modeling of events and time-sensitive user interests and intents, which were rarely addressed in the literature. There have been preliminary efforts in the research and industrial communities to address algorithms, architectures, evaluation methodologies and metrics.

We aim to bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss their recent breakthroughs and the challenges with addressing time-aware information access, both from the algorithmic and the architectural perspectives.

This workshop is a successor to the successful SIGIR 2012 Workshop on Time Aware Information Access (#TAIA2012). Where the 2012 edition was the first to bring together a broad set of academic and industrial researchers around the topic of time-aware information access, the specific focus of this workshop is on the many time-aware benchmarking activities that are ongoing in 2013.