CFP: SIGIR 2009 Workshop on INFORMATION ACCESS IN A MULTILINGUAL WORLD

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　　　　 　CALL FOR PAPERS

　　　　 　　SIGIR 2009 Workshop
INFORMATION ACCESS IN A MULTILINGUAL WORLD:
TRANSITIONING FROM RESEARCH TO REAL WORLD APPLICATIONS

　　　　　　23 July 2009, Boston, USA.
　　http://www.sics.se/events/clir2009
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Workshop to be held in conjunction with the SIGIR on July 23, 2009
in cooperation with the Japanese Info-plosion project.

Chairs: Fredric Gey, Noriko Kando, Jussi Karlgren


OPENING INVITED TALK:

Dr Ralf Steinberger, EC Joint Research Council ・ISPRI, Italy, speaking
on "The European Multilingual Media Monitoring Initiative"


IMPORTANT DATES:

June 1, 2009 Papers submitted electronically to Chairs.
June 15, 2009 Notice of acceptance or rejections of papers sent to authors
June 22, 2009 Final papers submitted for workshop notebook
July 23, 2009 Workshop held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA


TOPICS FOR THIS WORKSHOP are focused on transition of technology into
use: Practical implementation of multilingual information access. User
studies and interfaces for effective multilingual information access.
Requirements for practicable multilingual information access systems.
Tasks and challenges for multilingual technology. Uses of Machine
Translation (MT) in multilingual information access. Moving from common
language pairs to less-commonly taught languages. Multilingual digital
libraries. Scalability issues in multilingual information access.


TWO KINDS OF PAPERS are sought: Short position papers (2-5 pages) which
focus on particular areas and argue a vision of the future in the area,
either as necessary development to further multilingual information
access or as necessary research to further practical development and
implementation of multilingual information access. As many position
papers as possible will be accepted within time constraints of the
workshop. Longer research scope papers (up to 10 pages) which provide
depth and background as well as a research or development vision. All
papers will be reviewed by a program committee and a small number
research and development papers will be selected for presentation at the
workshop.


BACKGROUND AND ISSUES:

A successful workshop on "New Directions In Multilingual Information
Access" was held at SIGIR 2006 in Seattle. Since 2006, substantial
additional research and development has progressed in this area, with
the release of the JRC-Acquis Multilingual Parallel Corpus (22 European
languages), operational multilingual news summarization sites, a
multilingual patent corpus, and research into multilingual interactive
image retrieval, and a new evaluation campaign for Indian subcontinent
languages (FIRE). Large national initiatives in Europe (QUAERO in France
and THESEUS in Germany) and Japan (Info-Plosion) have been launched to
promote transition of information access research from laboratories into
industrial practice. To be incorporated into such initiatives,
multilingual research efforts must prove their usefulness for industrial
deployment. While benchmarking efforts can prove the usefulness of some
technical component, the influence of a technology on the take-up of an
application is only part of the picture. One goal of this workshop will
be to explore whether the research community is ready to meet the
challenges posed by these major initiatives. Can current prototype
systems scale up or meet the requirements of content and usage that such
programs imply? What is needed to move from the lab to the real world,
in terms of research, user studies and interfaces, resources and
equipment? How much more attention needs to be paid to presentation of
multilingual results? It is time for the research and application
communities to get together and examine these questions in depth.


ORGANIZERS:

Fredric C. Gey
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Noriko Kando
National Institute of Informatics, JAPAN
Jussi Karlgren
Swedish Institute of Computer Science, SWEDEN
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