Special Issue on Constructing Click Models for Search Users

Information Retrieval Journal Call for Papers Special Issue on Constructing Click Models for Search Users

Search has reached a level at which a good understanding of user interactions may significantly impact its quality. Among all kinds of user interactions, click-through behavior on search results is an important one that attracted much attention. Clicking a certain result (or advertisement, or query suggestions, etc) is usually regarded as an implicit feedback signal for its relevance, which is, however, very noisy. In order to understand if and how much a user click on a result document implies true relevance, one has to take into account different factors (usually named behavior biases), in addition to the factor of relevance, that may affect user click behaviors. A number of click models have been proposed, which usually involve additional events (e.g. examination) and different assumptions. These models are designed to eliminate the effects of various behavior biases (e.g. position bias, presentation bias, trust bias, etc.) in order to provide a better estimation of result relevance. Although many existing works show that click models help improve performance of search engines, a lot more research questions remain to be investigated. For example: How are clicks influenced by user’s background and preferences? by multimedia verticals in a result page? by the underlying search task and the search session? How can we derive a reliable evaluation measure of search quality from user’s click-through? How can we gain information on the quality of documents using user clicks? How should the user interface designed to facilitate the collection of reliable click-through? … This special issue aims to present the latest advances addressing these and other related questions. Topics of interest for this issue include but are not limited to: 

Click models for a heterogeneous Web search environment  User behavior modeling on search result pages with vertical results  User behavior modeling on sponsored search results  Personalized click behavior modeling  User behavior modeling on various kinds of search interactions  Heterogeneous result ranking

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Click models and interaction behaviors  Mouse movement behavior modeling for click models  Eye-tracking behavior modeling for click models  Interaction behavior on landing pages  Other interaction behaviors for better click modeling

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Click models and complex search tasks  Click models in multi-query sessions  Context factors in click modeling  Behavior modeling for exploratory search  Joint modeling of click-through and query reformulation behaviors  Other behavior modeling issues in complex search tasks

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Click models applications in industrial systems  Click model for Web search engine  Click model for sponsored search  Click model for vertical search systems  Click model for other industrial systems

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Click models and Web search evaluation  Click models for automatic performance evaluation  Click models for designing better evaluation metrics  Evaluation of click modeling  Other evaluation issues in click modeling

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Data quality issues in click models  Click spam/fraud detection  User expertise/preference modeling for click models  Click behavior quality estimation in Web search

Important Dates Initial submissions due: Initial reviewer feedback: Revised submissions due: Final decisions:

27 November 2015 5 February 2015 4 March 2016 15 April 2016

Special Issue Guest Editors Yiqun Liu, Tsinghua University, China Jian-Yun Nie, Université de Montréal, Canada Yi Chang, Yahoo Labs Sunnyvale, U.S.

Paper Submission Papers submitted to this special issue for possible publication must be original and must not be under consideration for publication in any other journal or conference. Previously published or accepted conference papers must contain at least 30% new material to be considered for the special issue. All papers are to be submitted by referring to http://www.springer.com/10791. At the beginning of the submission process, under “Article Type”, please select the appropriate special issue. All manuscripts must be prepared according to the journal publication guidelines which can also be found on the website provided above. Papers will be reviewed following the journal standard review process. For inquiries on the above please contact Yiqun Liu, [email protected].

http://www.springer.com/journal/10791