CALL FOR PAPERS
INFORMATION ACCESS IN A MULTILINGUAL WORLD: TRANSITIONING FROM RESEARCH TO
REAL WORLD APPLICATIONS

A Workshop at SIGIR 2009 (http://www.sigir2009.org/) : 32nd International
Conference on Research And Development in Information Retrieval, 23 July
2009, Boston, USA. Workshop Web Site: http://www.sics.se/events/clir2009

Chairs: Fredric Gey, Noriko Kando, Jussi Karlgren

OPENING INVITED TALK
Dr Ralf Steinberger, EC Joint Research Council - ISPRI, Italy, speaking on
The European Multilingual Media Monitoring Initiative

IMPORTANT DATES
June 1, 2009 Papers submitted electronically to Chairs.
June 15, 2009 Notice of acceptance or rejections of papers sent to authors
June 22, 2009 Final papers submitted for workshop notebook
July 23, 2009 Workshop held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA

TOPICS FOR THIS WORKSHOP are focused on transition of technology into use:
Practical implementation of multilingual information access. User studies
and interfaces for effective multilingual information access. Requirements
for practicable multilingual information access systems. Tasks and
challenges for multilingual technology. Uses of Machine Translation (MT) in
multilingual information access. Moving from common language pairs to
less-commonly taught languages. Multilingual digital libraries. Scalability
issues in multilingual information access.

TWO KINDS OF PAPERS are sought: Short position papers (2-5 pages) which
focus on particular areas and argue a vision of the future in the area,
either as necessary development to further multilingual information access
or as necessary research to further practical development and implementation
of multilingual information access. As many position papers as possible will
be accepted within time constraints of the workshop. Longer research scope
papers (up to 10 pages) which provide depth and background as well as a
research or development vision. All papers will be reviewed by a program
committee and a small number research and development papers will be
selected for presentation at the workshop.

BACKGROUND AND ISSUES
A successful workshop on "New Directions In Multilingual Information Access"
was held at SIGIR 2006 in Seattle. Since 2006, substantial additional
research and development has progressed in this area, with the release of
the JRC-Acquis Multilingual Parallel Corpus (22 European languages),
operational multilingual news summarization sites, a multilingual patent
corpus, and research into multilingual interactive image retrieval, and a
new evaluation campaign for Indian subcontinent languages (FIRE). Large
national initiatives in Europe (QUAERO in France and THESEUS in Germany) and
Japan (Info-Plosion) have been launched to promote transition of information
access research from laboratories into industrial practice. To be
incorporated into such initiatives, multilingual research efforts must prove
their usefulness for industrial deployment. While benchmarking efforts can
prove the usefulness of some technical component, the influence of a
technology on the take-up of an application is only part of the picture. 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, user studies and interfaces, 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.

ORGANIZERS:
Fredric C. Gey University of California, Berkeley, USA
Noriko Kando National Institute of Informatics, JAPAN
Jussi Karlgren Swedish Institute of Computer Science, SWEDEN



CALL FOR PAPERS
INFORMATION ACCESS IN A MULTILINGUAL WORLD:
TRANSITIONING FROM RESEARCH TO REAL WORLD APPLICATIONS

A Workshop at SIGIR 2009 (http://www.sigir2009.org/) : 32nd International Conference on Research And Development in Information Retrieval, 23 July 2009, Boston, USA. Workshop Web Site: http://www.sics.se/events/clir2009

Chairs: Fredric Gey, Noriko Kando, Jussi Karlgren

OPENING INVITED TALK
Dr Ralf Steinberger, EC Joint Research Council – ISPRI, Italy, speaking on
"The European Multilingual Media Monitoring Initiative"

IMPORTANT DATES
June 1, 2009 Papers submitted electronically to Chairs.
June 15, 2009 Notice of acceptance or rejections of papers sent to authors
June 22, 2009 Final papers submitted for workshop notebook
July 23, 2009 Workshop held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA

TOPICS FOR THIS WORKSHOP are focused on transition of technology into use: Practical implementation of multilingual information access. User studies and interfaces for effective multilingual information access. Requirements for practicable multilingual information access systems. Tasks and challenges for multilingual technology. Uses of Machine Translation (MT) in multilingual information access. Moving from common language pairs to less-commonly taught languages. Multilingual digital libraries. Scalability issues in multilingual information access.

TWO KINDS OF PAPERS are sought: Short position papers (2-5 pages) which focus on particular areas and argue a vision of the future in the area, either as necessary development to further multilingual information access or as necessary research to further practical development and implementation of multilingual information access. As many position papers as possible will be accepted within time constraints of the workshop. Longer research scope papers (up to 10 pages) which provide depth and background as well as a research or development vision. All papers will be reviewed by a program committee and a small number research and development papers will be selected for presentation at the workshop.

BACKGROUND AND ISSUES:
A successful workshop on "New Directions In Multilingual Information Access" was held at SIGIR 2006 in Seattle. Since 2006, substantial additional research and development has progressed in this area, with the release of the JRC-Acquis Multilingual Parallel Corpus (22 European languages), operational multilingual news summarization sites, a multilingual patent corpus, and research into multilingual interactive image retrieval, and a new evaluation campaign for Indian subcontinent languages (FIRE). Large national initiatives in Europe (QUAERO in France and THESEUS in Germany) and Japan (InfoPlosion) have been launched to promote transition of information access research from laboratories into industrial practice. To be incorporated into such initiatives, multilingual research efforts must prove their usefulness for industrial deployment. While benchmarking efforts can prove the usefulness of some technical component, the influence of a technology on the take-up of an application is only part of the picture.

ORGANIZERS:
Fredric C. Gey
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Noriko Kando
National Institute of Informatics, JAPAN
Jussi Karlgren
Swedish Institute of Computer Science, SWEDEN