Springer Academic Publishers
Journal of Information Retrieval

Special Issue on
Non-English Web Retrieval


Important dates:
-------------------
Abstract submission: May 4, 2008
Paper submission: May 11, 2008, 11:50pm Hawaii Standand Time
Notification of acceptance/rejection: June 25, 2008


Guest Editors:
-----------------
Fotis Lazarinis, Technological Education Institute, Mesolonghi, Greece
Jesus Vilares, Department of Computer Sciences, University of A Coruna,
Spain
John Tait, Information Retrieval Facility, Austria
Efthimis N. Efthimiadis, The Information School, University of Washington


Contacts:
-------------
lazarinf [at] teimes [dot] gr
jvilares [at] udc [dot] es
john.tait [at] ir-facility [dot] org
efthimis [at] u [dot] washington [dot] edu

Site: http://rea.teimes.gr/lazarinf/NonEnglishWebIR/

Since its conception, the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) has rapidly become one
of the most widely used services of the Internet. Its friendly interface and
its hypermedia features attract virtually every computer user around the
globe. As a result, the Web has become a dominant global multicultural and
multilingual pool of various types of data. Further it continues to
grow. Finding information that satisfies specific criteria is a regular
daily activity of almost every Web user. Recent Web statistics showed that
almost 65% of the online citizens are non-English language users. As the Web
population continues to grow, especially in Asia, Africa, and South America,
more non-English users will be amassed online. Recent studies showed that
non-English queries and unclassifiable queries have nearly tripled in the
last decade. The main conclusion from previous research is that most search
engine features are primarily focused on the English language.

Based on previous studies and on the experiences and conclusions of the
iNEWS07 (Improving Non-English Web Searching) ACM SIGIR'07 Workshop, the
special issue aims to address the challenges and directions in
Non-English Web retrieval.

For the special issue we seek high quality papers with theoretical and/or
experimental orientation. Topics of interest for the special issue, as
applied to Non-English Web searching, include, but are not limited to:

* Evaluation
* User search behaviour
* Query log analysis
* Indexing
* Information extraction
* Summarization
* User studies
* Retrieval models
* Question answering
* Natural language processing
* Concept based image retrieval
* Creation of multi-lingual web collections
* Intranet/enterprise search
* Text categorization and clustering
* Digital libraries
* Cross language and multilingual retrieval


Submission Instructions:
----------------------------
Submissions must be in English and adhere to the format specified by the
journal Information Retrieval. For formatting guidelines please see: JIR
formatting guidelines

The abstract should be about 250-words in plain text. Include title,
author(s) and author(s) affiliations, contact details, and up to five (5)
keywords that describe your work.

The full paper should be anonymous, and authors should conceal their
identity where it is practical to do so. Include a 200-250-word abstract and
up to five keywords. The paper should range between 16-20 pages. Both the
abstract and the full paper should be uploaded in the Springer paper
submission system

For Word and LaTeX templates, please click Springer Word and Latex templates

Reviewers for the special issue:

1. Alonso, Miguel (Univ. of A Coruña, Spain)
2. Baeza Yates, Ricardo (Yahoo! Research Barcelona)
3. Chen, Zheng (Microsoft Research Asia, China)
4. Dalamagas, Theodore (National Technical Univ. of Athens, Greece)
5. de Rijke, Maarten (Univ. of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
6. Hawking, David (CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia)
7. Huang, Chu-Ren (Academia Sinica, Taiwan)
8. Järvelin, Kalervo (University of Tampere, Finland)
9. Kanaan, Ghassan (Yarmouk University, Jordan)
10. Kando, Noriko (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
11. Karanikolas, Nikitas (TEI of Athens, Greece)
12. Kuang-hua, Chen (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
13. Levene, Mark (Birkbeck University of London, UK)
14. Losada, David (Univ. of Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
15. Min, Song (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA)
16. Nasredine, Semmar (LIC2M/CEA-LIST, France)
17. Ntoulas, Alexandros (Microsoft Search Labs, USA)
18. Ounis, Iadh (Univ. of Glasgow, UK)
19. Pereira, Gabriel (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)
20. Peters, Carol (ISTI-CNR, Italy)
21. Plachouras, Vassilis (Yahoo! Research Barcelona)
22. Rambow, Owen (Columbia University, USA)
23. Savoy, Jacques (Univ. of Neuchatel, Switzerland)
24. Stamou, Sofia (Univ. of Patras, Greece)
25. Sutcliffe, Richard (Univ. of Limerick, Ireland)
26. Vilares, Manuel (Univ. of Vigo, Spain)
27. White, Ryen (Microsoft, USA)