Call for papers

The news industry is continuing to experience a revolution. News consumption habits are changing with an increase in both the volume of news and the variety of sources, along with a continuing trend away from print. Readers need new mechanisms to help with this vast volume of information so they can not only find a signal in the noise, but also understand what is happening in the world given the multiple points of view describing every event. At the same time, publishers and aggregators need new ways to reach and retain their audience, and to monetize their services. These challenges in journalism relate to Information Retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP) fields such as: verification of a source’s reliability; the integration of news with other sources of information; real-time processing of both news content and social streams; automatic summarization; news recommendation; multilingual NLP; and entity recognition. Although IR and NLP have been applied to news for decades, the changing nature of the space requires fresh approaches and a closer collaboration with our colleagues from the journalism environment. Building on the success of NewsIR’16, the goal of this workshop is to stimulate discussion between the communities and to share interesting approaches to these challenges. We invite contributions on any of the multiple IR tasks that can help solve real user problems in this area.

Topics of Interest

Relevant topics of interest for NewsIR’18 include but are not limited to:
Traditional and social media integration
Temporal aspects of news
Credibility, controversy and fact-checking
Bias and plurality in news
Information silos and the effect of algorithms on news consumption
Diversification
Event and anomaly detection
IR/NLP in Data Journalism
Multiple document summarization
User-generated content (e.g., using comments to enhance news retrieval)
News recommendation
De-duplication and clustering of news articles
Author identification and disambiguation
Evaluation of news retrieval systems
Data visualization
Conversational journalism and chat bots
Mobile-first journalism
Evaluation
Data Visualization
Data collections

There is no formal data challenge for this workshop, but several relevant datasets may stimulate research and evaluation. Signal Media released a collection of one million news articles in 2016 for research uses. Further details, including instructions on how to obtain the data, can be found here Igor Brigadir released a set of tweets related to this set, which can be found here.