[ntcir:138] NTCIR-4 Open Submittion Session: Call for Papers

[ntc-chair@xxxxxxxxx]

                          CALL FOR PAPERS

            NTCIR-4 2004 Meeting: Open Submission Session
	    Evaluation of Information Access Technologies:
      Information Retrieval, Question Answering and Summarization
                   June 2-4, 2004, Tokyo, Japan

          http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir-ws4/index.html



The NTCIR-4 Workshop hosts an open submission session. Paper submissions
are invited from anybody who are interested in the investigation of the
information access technologies and the evaluation methodologies.
Submissions from non-NTCIR task participants are welcome.

NTCIR is a series of evaluation workshops designed to enhance the
research in information access technologies such as information
retrieval, question answering, text summarization, text mining, etc., by
providing infrastructure of evaluation and testing including large-scale
reusable test collections, a forum of researchers, investigation of
evaluation methodologies and metrics. The workshop is held once per one
and half years, i.e. about 18-month interval. The NTCIR-4 selected five
areas of research as "tasks"; cross-lingual information retrieval
(CLIR), patent retrieval, question answering, text summarization, and
Web retrieval.

NTCIR Workshop has started in late 1998 with emphasis on Japanese and
English, then gradually enlarged the scope to East Asian languages, i.e.
Chinese and Korea, and English documents published in East Asia, and has
attracted international participation not only from Asia but also from
North America, Europe, and Oceania.

This year's meeting will include a special emphasis on bringing together
researchers in natural language processing, information retrieval, and
other language processing technologies for information access, so that
we will be able to work together towards moving this interdisciplinary
research area of information access.

NTCIR-4 Workshop Meeting will held from Wednesday June 2 to Friday June
4.  It includes an overview of the NTCIR-4, overview of each of the five
above mentioned tasks and selected full system papers from each task,
digital posters (poster with demo, or ordinary poster) by every active
task participant, and full and short papers in the open submission session.

As for the open submission session, the organizers especially encourages
submissions that discuss combinations of different information access
technologies (ex., question answering and summarization; video, speech
and information retrieval, etc.), evaluation methodologies and metrics,
and any attempt to exploit the information access and evaluation on
extremely large-scale unstructured dynamic document collection such as WEB.


			  IMPORTANT DATES

APR 15, 2004	Submission Due: extended abstracts or full papers
APR 30, 2004    Notification: acceptance/rejection
MAY 25, 2004	Camera-ready full papers, short papers, posters
JUNE 2-4, 2004	Conference

			TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of interest include but not limited to:

* Text summarization
* Question answering
* Information extraction
* Information retrieval
* Statistical and learning techniques for text processing,
  including language modelling
* Multi- or cross-lingual information access
  including CLIR, CL question answering, multilingual summarization,
  language identification, retrieval
* Multi- or transmedia information access
* Evaluation, test collection building, metrics


		    SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Requirements: Submissions must describe original, completed,
unpublished work, and include concrete evaluation results.

Multiple submission: Papers that have been or will be submitted to other
meetings, publications, oral presentation as an NTCIR active task
participant must report the information about multiple submission. If
the paper is accepted by other conference/session/publication, the
authors must advice this to the program chairs and choose which occasion
the work will be presented by May 15, 2004.

Format: The submission must be electronic PDF format. For extended
abstract, any format no longer than three pages in A4-sized paper
including tables/figures and references. For the full paper, submissions
should follow the instruction of NTCIR Working Notes guideline:
two-column and no longer than eight pages including tables/figures and
references.

A PDF file of the paper/abstract and a separate sheet for the
information about the paper should be sent to
ntc-submit@xxxxxxxxx as attachment of an email.

The separate sheet will include:

   Title of Work
   Author(s)' names, affiliations, and email addresses
   Contact author, contact information
   Number of pages:
   A short list of keywords
   Abstract (no more than 500 words)
   Information for multiple submission: whether the paper is under
consideration for other conferences/publication/oral presentation as
NTCIR active task participant or not

The submissions may be accepted for oral presentation or for
presentation in a digital poster session. The accepted papers will be
included in the online working notes and printed/online formal
proceedings which will be published after the meeting.


			   CONFERENCE VENUE

The NTCIR-4 Workshop Meeting will be held at the National Center for
Sciences, where the National Institute of Informatics is situated. It is
central part of Tokyo and just across the street from the Royal Palace.
The travel and hotel information will be availabe on the Workshop Web
site soon.

			
MEETING WEB SITE:  http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir-ws4/index.html

NTCIR-4 WORKSHOP (task description, collections used, etc):
            http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/workshop/work-en.html

NTCIR Project: http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/index-en.html

enquiries: ntcadm@xxxxxxxxx, or Noriko Kando, at kando (at) nii.ac.jp
submission: ntc-submit@xxxxxxxxx, or Noriko Kando, at kando (at) nii.ac.jp