Workshop ECIR 2010 on Large-Scale Hierarchical Classification

Large-Scale Hierarchical Classification Workshop European Conference on
Information Retrieval 2010

March 28, 2010
The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK

http://lshtc.iit.demokritos.gr/workshop

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THE CHALLENGE

The workshop is associated to the PASCAL 2 Large-Scale Hierarchical Text
Classification Challenge. The challenge was completed recently with the very
active participation of several teams from around the world. The results are
publicly available at: http://lshtc.iit.demokritos.gr/

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SCOPE

Hierarchies are becoming ever more popular for the organization of
documents, particularly on the Web (e.g. Web directories). Along with their
widespread use comes the need for automated classification of new documents
to the categories in the hierarchy. Research on large-scale classification
so far has focused on large numbers of documents and/or large numbers of
features, with a limited number of categories. However, this is not the case
in hierarchical category systems, such as DMOZ. Approaching this problem,
either existing large-scale classifiers can be extended, or new methods need
to be developed. The goal of this workshop is to discuss and assess some of
these strategies. In particular some of the issues that we expect to cover
in the workshop are:
* Learning to classify against many categories.
* Data sparseness in the presence of large datasets.
* Use of the statistical dependence of hierarchically organized classes.
* The role of shrinkage methods in large hierarchies.
* Ensemble methods for hierarchical classification.
* Extending existing large-scale classifiers to hierarchies.
* Challenging hierarchical classification tasks and datasets.

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IMPORTANT DATES

* Paper submission – January 18
* Acceptance notification – February 15
* Final paper – March 1

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SUBMISSIONS

We expect submissions by the various teams who have participated to the
LSHTC challenge. At the same time, we strongly encourage submissions from
researchers not participating to the challenge. The Easychair electronic
submission system will be used for the papers. Please, refer to the workshop
page for details about the submission format and process.

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ORGANISERS

Eric Gaussier, LIG, Grenoble, France
George Paliouras, NCSR “Demokritos”, Athens, Greece Aris Kosmopoulos, NCSR “Demokritos” and AUEB, Athens, Greece Sujeevan Aseervatham, LIG, Grenoble, France

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