[ntcir:201] SIGIR Multilingual Workshop: Deadline extension to 30 May

[Noriko Kando <kando@xxxxxxxxx>]

Final for Papers
Call for papers: -- Deadline Extended to May 30
NEW DIRECTIONS IN MULTILINGUAL INFORMATION ACCESS
http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/sigir2006-mlia.htm
Chairs:  Fredric Gey, Noriko Kando, Carol Peters, Chin-Yew Lin

A Workshop at SIGIR 2006 (http://www.sigir2006.org/) :
29th International Conference on Research And Development
in Information Retrieval, 10 August 2006, Seattle, USA


OPENING INVITED TALK:

Dr David A Evans, CEO of Clairvoyance Corporation
"From R & D to practice -- challenges to multilingual
information access in the real world"


IMPORTANT DATES (submission deadline extended):

May  30, 2006   Papers submitted electronically to gey@xxxxxxxxxxxx
June 21, 2006   Notice of acceptance or rejections of papers
                sent to Authors
July  5, 2006   Final papers submitted for workshop notebook
Aug. 10, 2006   Workshop held in Seattle, USA


TWO KINDS OF PAPERS are sought:  Short position papers (maximum 4 pages)
which focus on particular areas and argue a vision of the future
in the area.   Longer research scope papers (up to 10 pages) which
provide depth and background as well as a research vision.  All
papers will be reviewed by a program committee and a limited
number selected for presentation at the workshop.

SUGGESTED TOPICS include but are not limited to:  Multilingual
summarization, Cross-language cross-media search (speech, video,
audio), Uses of statistical MT in multilingual information access,
Less-commonly taught languages, Cross-language text categorization,
other CLIR research issues,  Multilingual named entity recognition,
Multilingual digital libraries, scalability issues in multilingual
information access.

BACKGROUND:
A successful workshop on "Cross-Language Information Retrieval:
A Research Roadmap" was held at SIGIR 2002 in Finland (see
http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/sigir-2002/).  The 2002 workshop
 attempted to establish a research agenda in Cross-Language
Information Retrieval (CLIR) for the next 5 years.  The 2006
workshop will review and renew this vision.  Since 2002,
research has been vigorously pursued and interesting results
achieved not only in cross-language information retrieval through
the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) and NTCIR Asian
Language Retrieval and Question-answering Workshop, but also
in multilingual summarization workshops and  cross-language
named entity extraction challenges by the Association for
Computational Linguistics and the Geographic Information
retrieval (GeoCLEF) track of CLEF.


ISSUES:
Another major issue is how to transition research results
into practice.  This challenge has become more compelling as
recent digital content initiatives by Google, Yahoo and MSN
have inspired the European Commission to launch an effort
aimed at building The European Library.  Enabling multilingual
access to the contents of Europe's national libraries will
play a major role. At the same time, the Quaero project for the
development of a European search engine was announced last
summer by the French president Jacques Chirac. Similarly,
in Asia, governments are concerned about the hegemony of US
based search engines.   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, 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.

This workshop will thus have a broad scope including both
research questions and application issues.  Presentations
will focus on both research and practical issues. One aim
of the workshop will be to suggest guidelines for transfer
of research technology into practice.

ORGANIZERS:
Fredric C. Gey
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Noriko Kando
National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Carol Peters
Italian National Research Council, Italy
Chin-Yew Lin
Microsoft Research Asia, China
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