Crowdsourcing for Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval Journal is going to publish a special Issue on "Crowdsourcing for Information Retrieval". In their Call for papers, it is mentioned that: "the advent of crowdsourcing is revolutionizing information technology by enabling a wide host of new methodology for data collection, annotation, and processing, as well as system design and evaluation. Given the massive datasets that are both ubiquitous and rapidly growing in today’s digital age, the field of information retrieval (IR) stands to particularly benefit from such advances as academic researchers and industrial practitioners alike leverage the wisdom of crowds to more effective cope with and exploit massive datasets. The novelty of crowdsourcing makes this is an especially exciting time to focus the IR community’s attention toward it and provide an opportunity for discussion and education on this key emerging area. Traditionally manual-labor intensive processes have been particularly impacted by dramatically reducing the time, cost, and effort involved."
Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following areas:

* Theoretical, experimental, and/or methodological developments advancing state-of-the-art knowledge of crowdsourcing for IR.

* Novel applications of IR enabled by crowdsourcing (e.g. use of real-time crowd response, using human computation to “close the loop” with automation for hybrid IR systems, etc.)

* Tutorials or best practices on employing crowdsourcing to support different IR scenarios.

* Innovative ideas for better using crowdsourcing platforms.

* Description of novel software packages improving ease and/or quality of crowdsourcing.

* Reflective or forward-looking vision on use of crowdsourcing in this area.

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