In this workshop we target methods that exploit semantics in search-related tasks. One of the major obstacles in bridging the gap between IR and Natural Language Processing (NLP) is how to retain the flexibility and precision of working with text at the lexical level while gaining the greater descriptive precision that NLP provides. We have solicited contributions on automatic analysis of queries and documents in order to encode and exploit information beyond surface-level keywords: named entities, relations, semantic roles, etc. 
