Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval

The publication date is one day earlier then the EST date to provide the proceedings to attendees in Australian on the first day of the conference It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the Eighth Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval (ESAIR'15), held at CIKM 2015 in Melbourne, Australia, on October 23, 2015. The amount of structured content published on the Web has been growing rapidly, making it possible to address increasingly complex information access tasks. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of large-scale human-curated knowledge bases as well as a growing array of techniques that identify or extract information automatically from unstructured and semi-structured sources. The ESAIR workshop series aims to advance the general research agenda on the problem of creating and exploiting semantic annotations. The eighth edition of ESAIR, with a renewed group of organizers, sets its focus on applications. We dedicate a special "Annotations in Action" track to demonstrations that showcase innovative prototype systems, in addition to the regular research and position paper contributions. The call for papers attracted a total of 19 submissions, out of which 10 were accepted. The final program includes 4 regular, 2 position, and 3 demo papers (one contribution was withdrawn). In addition, the workshop programme features invited talks by Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam) and Matthew Kelcey (Google, Inc.). The workshop is intended to be highly interactive to encourage group discussion and active collaboration among attendees. A final discussion session wraps up the event with the objective to identify and formulate specific action items for future research and development. Following the tradition of earlier ESAIR editions, a social event is organized for further, more informal discussions among workshop participants and other CIKM attendees.