GamifIR ?14: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval

This workshop focuses on the challenges and opportunities that gamification can present for the information retrieval (IR) community. Gamification is the application of game mechanics, such as leader boards, badges or achievement points, in non-gaming environments with the aim to increase user engagement, data quality or cost effectiveness. A core aspect of gamification solutions is to infuse intrinsic motivations to participate by leveraging people's natural desires for achievement and competition. While gamification, on the one hand, is emerging as the next big thing in industry, e.g., an effective way to generate business, on the other hand, it is also becoming a major research area. However, its adoption in Information Retrieval is still in its infancy, despite the wide ranging IR tasks that may benefit from gamification techniques. These include the manual annotation of documents for IR evaluation, the participation in user studies to study interactive IR challenges, or the shift from single-user search to social search, just to mention a few.