From Republicans to teenagers: group membership and search (GRUMPS)

In the early years of information retrieval, the focus of research was on systems aspects such as crawling, indexing, and relevancy ranking. Over the years, more and more user-related information such as click information or search history has entered the equation creating more and more personalized search experiences, though still within the scope of the same overall system. Though fully personalized search is probably desirable, this individualistic perspective does not exploit the fact that a lot of a users behavior can be explained through their group membership. Children, despite individual differences, share many challenges and needs; as do men, Republicans, Chinese or any user group. This workshop takes a group-centric approach to IR and invites contributions that either (i) propose and evaluate IR systems for a particular user group or that (ii) describe how the search behavior of specific groups differ, potentially requiring a different way of addressing their needs.