Special Track on Information Access and Retrieval (SAC-IAR)

The research context of information access and retrieval aims at modelling, designing and implementing systems able to provide fast and effective content-based multimodal access to a large amount of multimedia information. Information Retrieval (IR) can be considered as the first historical research area aimed at defining systems for the automatic access to huge amounts of information. Information Retrieval technologies are currently being used in many different application contexts that go far beyond the initial scope of their design. The application of models and techniques proposed and tested in standard experimental contexts to new application areas is a very challenging task that is worth of great attention by the researchers.

Nowadays there is a growing need to access and retrieve relevant information across media, across languages and across modalities. With the expansion of the Internet and of the Web, other access techniques have been identified and developed, such as Recommender Systems and Information Filtering systems, Question Answering Systems and Metasearch engines. The current trends of the research in information access and retrieval include document indexing, document classification and categorization, user interfaces, information visualisation, query languages, topic detection, management of multi-lingual and multimodal information access and retrieval, etc.

This special track is the seventh edition in the context of SAC and is concerned with the theory, implementation and evaluation of information access technologies to novel application areas and novel contexts.

We invite submission of original research contributions, and experimentations in emerging fields such as mobile Information Retrieval and Interfaces for information access and presentation.

The topics of interest include:

* document classification and categorization,
* information visualisation and user interfaces,
* query languages,
* topic detection,
* management of multi-lingual information,
* content indexing of audio-visual information,
* Information extraction and mining
* Modeling user context,
* Ontology based IRSs,
* Spoken IR,
* Search engines,
* Mobile search engines,
* models of information access and retrieval,
* applications of advanced information access and retrieval systems,
* multimedia and multimodal information access and retrieval,
* content-based and collaborative information filtering,
* distributed information access and retrieval.

Guidelines for Submission:

Original papers from the above-mentioned or other related areas will be considered. This includes three categories of submissions: 1) original and unpublished research; 2) reports of innovative computing applications in the arts, sciences, engineering, business, government, education and industry; and 3) reports of successful technology transfer to new problem domains. Each submitted paper will be fully refereed and undergo a blind review process by at least three referees. The accepted papers in all categories will be published in the ACM SAC 2008 proceedings.

Submit your paper electronically in either PDF or PS format via the electronic submission system at http://sac.cs.iupui.edu/SAC2008/. Submissions should be printable on a standard printer on common paper formats, such as US letter and A4. The author(s) name(s) and address(es) must not appear in the body of the paper, and self-reference should be in the third person. This is to facilitate blind review. The body of the paper should not exceed 4,000 words (approximately 10 pages, double-spaced).
The templates files of paper can be found at http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2008/.