With apologies for cross-posting.

CLEF 2021
http://clef2021.clef-initiative.eu/

21-24 September 2021, Bucharest, Romania

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First Call for Papers

Important Dates (Time zone: Anywhere on Earth)
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• Submission of All Papers: 3 May 202128 April 2021
• Notification of Acceptance: 4 June 20217 June 2021
• Camera Ready Copy due: 25 June 202121 June 2021
• Conference: 21-24 September 2021

The CLEF Conference addresses all aspects of Information Access in any modality and language. The CLEF conference includes presentation of research papers and a series of workshops presenting the results of lab-based comparative evaluation benchmarks. CLEF 2021 in Bucharest is the 12th year of the CLEF Conference series and the 22nd year of the CLEF initiative as a forum for information retrieval (IR) evaluation. The CLEF conference has a clear focus on experimental IR as carried out within evaluation forums (e.g., CLEF Labs, TREC, NTCIR, FIRE, MediaEval, RomIP, SemEval, and TAC) with special attention to the challenges of multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search also considering specific classes of users as children, students, impaired users in different tasks (e.g., academic, professional, or everyday-life). We invite paper submissions on significant new insights demonstrated on IR test collections, on analysis of IR test collections and evaluation measures, as well as on concrete proposals to push the boundaries of the Cranfield style evaluation paradigm.

All submissions to the CLEF main conference will be reviewed on the basis of relevance, originality, importance, and clarity. CLEF welcomes papers that describe rigorous hypothesis testing regardless of whether the results are positive or negative. CLEF also welcomes past runs/results/data analysis and new data collections. Methods are expected to be written so that they are reproducible by others, and the logic of the research design is clearly described in the paper. The conference proceedings will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

Topics
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Relevant topics for the CLEF 2021 Conference include but are not limited to:
• Information Access in any language or modality: information retrieval, image retrieval, question answering, search interfaces and design, infrastructures, etc.
• Analytics for Information Retrieval: theoretical and practical results in the analytics field that are specifically targeted for information access data analysis, data enrichment, etc.
• User studies either based on lab studies or crowdsourcing.
• Past results/run deep analysis both statistically and fine grain based.
• Evaluation initiatives: conclusions, lessons learned, impact and projection of any evaluation initiative after completing their cycle.
• Evaluation: methodologies, metrics, statistical and analytical tools, component based, user groups and use cases, ground-truth creation, impact of multilingual/multicultural/multimodal differences, etc.
• Technology transfer: economic impact/sustainability of information access approaches, deployment and exploitation of systems, use cases, etc.
• Interactive Information Retrieval evaluation: the interactive evaluation of information retrieval systems using user-centered methods, evaluation of novel search interfaces, novel interactive evaluation methods, simulation of interaction, etc.
• Specific application domains: Information access and its evaluation in application domains such as cultural heritage, digital libraries, social media, expert search, health information, legal documents, patents, news, books, plants, etc.
• New data collection: presentation of new data collection with potential high impact on future research, specific collections from companies or labs, multilingual collections.
• Work on data from rare languages, collaborative, social data.

Format
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Authors are invited to electronically submit original papers, which have not been published and are not under consideration elsewhere, using the LNCS proceedings format:
http://www.springer.com/it/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines

Two types of papers are solicited:
• Long papers: 12 pages max (including references). Aimed to report complete research work.
• Short papers: 6 pages max (including references). Position papers, new evaluation proposals, developments and applications, etc.

Papers will be peer-reviewed by 3 members of the program committee. Selection will be based on originality, clarity, and technical quality. Papers should be submitted in PDF format to the following address:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clef2021

CLEF 2021 will solicit applications from students that are either authors of papers to be presented at CLEF, or participants of some CLEF lab to waive the CLEF registration fee. Applications will start on June 7th and end by June 21st, while a committee will select the successful candidates. More information will soon be posted on the CLEF 2021 webpage.

Committee
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General Chairs:
• Bogdan Ionescu, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania
• K. Selcuk Candan, Arizona State University, USA

Program Chairs:
• Henning Müller, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, Switzerland
• Lorraine Goeuriot, Université Grenoble Alpes, France
• Birger Larsen, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark

Lab Chairs:
• Alexis Joly, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France
• Maria Maistro, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Florina Piroi, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

Publicity Chairs:
• Liviu Ștefan Daniel, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania
• Mihai Dogariu, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania

Outreach Program Chairs:
• Yu-Gang Jiang, Fudan University, China - Asian Liaison
• Hugo Jair Escalante, Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica, Optica y Electronica, Mexico - Central American Liaison
• Fabio A. Gonzalez, National University of Colombia, Colombia - South American Liaison
• Ben Herbst, Praelexis, South Africa - African Liaison
• Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, University of Ottawa, Canada - North American Liaison

Industry & Sponsorship Chairs:
• Șeila Abdulamit, Vodafone, Romania
• Mihai-Gabriel Constantin, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania
• Bogdan Boteanu, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania

Website & Social Media Chairs:
• Denisa Ionașcu, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania

Finance Chair:
• Ion Marghescu, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania

Proceedings Chairs:
• Guglielmo FaggioliLinda Cappellato, University of Padua, Italy
• Nicola Ferro, University of Padua, Italy

Lorraine Goeuriot
Maître de conférences
LIG - IUT1
Université Grenoble Alpes










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