With apologies for cross-posting.

CLEF 2020
https://clef2020.clef-initiative.eu/

22-25 September 2020, Thessaloniki, Greece
+++++++++++++++++++++
First call for papers

Important Dates (Time zone: Anywhere on Earth)
---------------
• Submission of All Papers: 28 April 2020
• Notification of Acceptance: 7 June 2020
• Camera Ready Copy due: 21 June 2020
• Conference: 22-25 September 2020

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 2020 Thessaloniki is the 11th year of the CLEF Conference series and the 21st 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
------
Relevant topics for the CLEF 2020 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
------
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 works.
• 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=clef2020

Committee
---------
Conference Chairs:
• Evangelos Kanoulas, Univ. of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
• Theodora Tsikrika, Information Technologies Institute, CERTH, Thessaloniki, Greece
• Stefanos Vrochidis, Information Technologies Institute, CERTH, Thessaloniki, Greece
• Avi Arampatzis, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece

Program Chairs:
• Hideo Joho, University of Tsukuba, Japan
• Christina Lioma, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Lab Chairs:
• Aurélie Névéol, LIMSI, CNRS, France
• Carsten Eickhoff, Brown University, USA

Lab Mentorship Chair:
• Lorraine Goeuriot, Université Grenoble Alpes, France

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