NEW DIRECTIONS IN MULTILINGUAL INFORMATION ACCESS

10 August 2006, Seattle, USA

http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/sigir2006-mlia.htm

A Workshop at SIGIR 2006 (http://www.sigir2006.org/): 29th International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

Chairs: Fredric Gey, Noriko Kando, Chin-Yew Lin, Carol Peters

(last updated September 12, 2006 to add full papers, fcg)

WORKSHOP PROGRAM (including abstracts and full papers in PDF format)

OPENING INVITED TALK Dr David A Evans, CEO of Clairvoyance Corp.

"From R&D to practice -- challenges to multilingual information access in the real world"

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

We wish to thank our program review committee who worked hard under tight deadlines:

ASIA:

Hsin-Hsi Chen, National Taiwan University, Taiwan,

Kuang-hua Chen, National Taiwan University, Taiwan,

Kazuaki Kishida, Keio University, Japan,

Gary Geunbee Lee, Pohang University of Science & Technology, Korea

Robert Luk, Polytechnic University of Hong Kong,

Tetsuya Sakai Toshiba Corporate R&D Center, Japan,

Yukata Sasaki, ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Laboratories, Japan

EUROPE:

Maristella Agosti, University of Padua, Italy

Martin Braschler, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland

Julio Gonzalo, LSI-UNED, Madrid, Spain,

Gareth Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland

Bernardo Magnini, ITC-irst, Trento, Italy,

Thomas Mandl, University of Hildesheim, Germany,

Daniella Petrelli, University of Sheffield, UK

Ari Pirkola, Tampere University, Finland

Mark Sanderson, University of Sheffield, UK,

Jacques Savoy, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland,

Maarten de Rijke U. Amsterdam, The Netherlands

NORTH AMERICA:

Aitao Chen, Yahoo Research, USA

KL Kwok, City University of New York, USA

James Mayfield, Johns Hopkins University, USA

Isabelle Moulinier, Thomson Legal and Regulatory, USA

Jian-Yun Nie, University of Montreal, Canada

Doug Oard, University of Maryland, USA

Miguel Ruiz, SUNY at Buffalo, USA

Background

A successful workshop on "Cross-Language Information Retrieval: A Research Roadmap" was held at SIGIR 2002 in Finland (see http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/sigir-2002/). The 2002 workshop attempted to establish a research agenda in Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) for the next 5 years. The 2006 workshop will review and renew this vision. Since 2002, research has been vigorously pursued and interesting results achieved not only in cross-language information retrieval through the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) and NTCIR Asian Language Retrieval and Question-answering Workshop, but also in multilingual summarization workshops and cross-language named entity extraction challenges by the Association for Computational Linguistics and the Geographic Information retrieval (GeoCLEF) track of CLEF.

Issues

Another major issue is how to transition research results into practice. This challenge has become more compelling as recent digital content initiatives by Google, Yahoo and MSN have inspired the European Commission to launch an effort aimed at building The European Library. Enabling multilingual access to the contents of Europe's national libraries will play a major role. At the same time, the Quaero project for the development of a European search engine was announced last summer by the French president Jacques Chirac. Similarly, in Asia, governments are concerned about the hegemony of US based search engines. 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, 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.

This workshop will thus have a broad scope including both research questions and application issues. Presentations will focus on both research and practical issues. One aim of the workshop will be to suggest guidelines for transfer of research technology into practice.

ORGANIZERS:

Fredric C. Gey

University of California, Berkeley, USA

Noriko Kando

National Institute of Informatics, Japan

Carol Peters

Italian National Research Council, Italy

Chin-Yew Lin

Microsoft Research Asia, China