Findwise Sponsors the Fourth Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC)

Findwise sponsors the The Fourth Swedish Language Technology Conference October 24-26, 2012, Lund (SLTC).

Findwise will also arrange a workshop about Exploratory Query-log Analysis at the the fourth Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC-2012), which will be held in Lund, 24-26 October 2012. It will be organized by the NLP group at LTH/Lund University with support from the Swedish Graduate School of Language Technology (GSLT).

- "Engaging in research and combining it with enterprise experience is very interesting and valuable. Just the kind of engagement that we are very proud of at Findwise. And we want to show this engagement by sponsoring SLTC and arranging a workshop on exploratory query-log analysis.", says Henrik Strindberg, Director of Research at Findwise.

One of the few occasions, perhaps the only, where an end user can submit a free question about their information need is through a search engine. Thus analysing the query logs can provide true insight about the information needs of an organisation both historically and in real time. This means that providing and tuning both content and search ranking models to fit the needs of the users is very important. Query log analysis can also be used gain deep insight about what is going on in an organisation.

Query logs have so far been in focus mostly at academic workshops and conferences. At the same time, with the upsurge in high quality search and user-interaction solutions in the enterprise world, companies have a ready access to often (very) large amounts of log data. This data which contains natural language queries, often remains largely unexplored and neglected.

The aim of this workshop is to show best practices and standards, new trends, techniques and potential of query log analysis in order to better analyse, draw conclusions, utilize and benefit from the query-log data. The workshop is meant as a forum where people working in the field of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning can share their ideas with representatives from the Enterprise world on the topic of query-log analysis

The workshop is arranged by Svetoslav Marinov, Paula Petcu and Henrik Strindberg from Findwise and the people Involved in the workshop are:

• Dimitrios Kokkinakis & Ann-Marie Eklund (Gothenburg University)
• Theodora Tsikrika (University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland)
• Fredrik Johansson, Tobias Färdig, Vinay Jethava, Devdatt Dudhashi (Chalmers University of Technology)
• Frédérique Segond (Objet Direct)
• Marina Santini, Computational Linguist, PhD