WORKSHOPS SIGIR 2009 Workshop Program Overview Diane Kelly, Workshop Chair University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill dianek@email.unc.edu SIGIR workshops provide a platform for presenting novel ideas in a less formal and more focused way than the main conference. The SIGIR Workshop Program is a venue where discussion, collaboration and the sharing of ideas can take place. In the 2009 call for workshop proposals, workshops that fostered collaboration, discussion, and group problem-solving were encouraged. SIGIR Workshops have spanned a range of topics over the years and this year was no exception. Topics of past workshops include those that represent novel IR research areas and areas from allied fields that have drifted into the IR community. Past workshops have also addressed new (or ongoing) challenges and research problems in the community. Many workshops have developed into successful series and have appeared at consecutive SIGIR Conferences or rotated among various related conferences to draw more diverse participation. This year’s program covered a range of topics including evaluation, multilingual retrieval, search in social media, ranking, and advertising. The program contained a mix of new workshops, as well as follow-ups from successful past workshops. Organizers were from academia, industry and government and a range of geographic locations. We received many excellent submissions and had a difficult decision of selecting a smaller set for the program. Fourteen workshops proposals were submitted and eight were selected for inclusion in the program. (For comparison, 15 were submitted last year and 9 were held.) Table 1 displays the titles and organizers of the workshops. Workshops are described in more detail by the organizers in the pages that follow this overview. In total, 290 people registered for a workshop. Individual workshop sizes ranged from 16 to 56, with an average size of 36. Table 1. 2009 SIGIR Workshops (ordered alphabetically by title) Title Organizers Future of IR Evaluation Jaap Kamps, Shlomo Geva, Carol Peters, Tetsuya Sakai, Andrew Trotman, Ellen Voorhees Information Access in a Multilingual World: Transitioning from Research to Real-World Applications Fredric Gey, Noriko Kando, Jussi Karlgren Information Retrieval and Advertising Misha Bilenko, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Matthew Richardson, Yi Zhang Large-Scale Distributed Systems for Information Retrieval (LSDS-IR) Claudio Lucchese, Gleb Skobeltsyn, Wai Gen Yee Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval Hang Li, Tie-Yan Liu, ChengXiang Zhai Redundancy, Diversity and Interdependent Document Relevance Filip Radlinski, Paul N. Bennett, Ben Carterette, Thorsten Joachims Search in Social Media Eugene Agichtein, Marti Hearst, Ian Soboroff Understanding the User: Logging and Interpreting User Interactions in Information Search and Retrieval Nicholas J. Belkin, Ralf Bierig, Georg Buscher, Ludger van Elst, Jacek Gwizdka, Joemon Jose, Jaime Teevan ACM SIGIR Forum 10 Vol. 43 No. 2 December 2009