Third International Workshop on Cross Lingual Information Access: Addressing the Information Need of Multilingual Societies (CLIAWS3)

A NAACL-HLT 2009 Workshop, June 4, 2009, Boulder, Colorado, USA

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Third International Workshop On

Cross Lingual Information Access:
Addressing the Information Need of Multilingual Societies


The development of digital and online information repositories is creating many opportunities and also new challenges in information retrieval. The availability of online documents in many different languages makes it possible for users around the world to directly access previously unimagined sources of information. However in conventional information retrieval systems the user must enter a search query in the language of the documents in order to retrieve it. This requires that users can express their queries in those languages in which the information is available and can understand the documents returned by the retrieval process. This restriction clearly limits the amount and type of information that an individual user really has access to.

Cross-Language Information Access is concerned with any/all technologies that let users express their query in their native language, and irrespective of the language in which the information is available, present the information in the user-preferred language or set of languages, in a manner that satisfies the user's information needs. The additional processing may take the form of machine translation of snippets, summarization and subsequent translation of summaries and/or information extraction.

The ongoing information explosion makes Information Extraction and Text Summarization particularly critical for successful functioning within the information society. These technologies, however, face new challenges with the adoption of the Web 2.0 paradigm (e.g. blogs, wikis) because of their inherent multi-source nature. Recognizing similar information across different sources and/or in different languages is of paramount importance in this multi-source, multilingual context. Often, it is not the similarity of information that matters, but its complementary nature. Applications need to be able to cope with the idiosyncratic nature of the new Web 2.0 media: mixed input, new jargon, ungrammatical and mixed-language input, emotional discourse, etc. In this context, synthesizing or inferring opinions from multiple sources and multiple languages is a new and exciting challenge for NLP.

In the past five years, research in Cross Lingual Information Access has been vigorously pursued through several international fora, such as, the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF), NTCIR Asian Language Retrieval, Question-answering Workshop and such other fora. A workshop geared towards cross language information retrieval in Indian languages (FIRE) is slated to take place in December 2008.  In addition to CLIR, significant results have been obtained in multilingual summarization workshops and cross-language named entity extraction challenges by the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) and the Geographic Information retrieval (GeoCLEF) track of CLEF. 

The previous two issues of this workshop were held in January 2007, during IJCAI 2007 in Hyderabad, India (http://search.iiit.ac.in/CLIA2007/) and subsequently during IJCNLP 2008 in Hyderabad, India (http://search.iiit.ac.in/CLIA2008/). Both the previous workshops attracted an encouraging number of submissions, and a large number  of registered participants. 

This workshop aims to bring together various trends in multi-source, cross and multilingual information retrieval and access, and provide a venue for researchers and practitioners from academia, government, and industry to interact and share a broad spectrum of ideas, views and applications. The workshop will consist of a set of invited talks and presentations of technical papers that will be selected after peer review from the submissions received.

We solicit submissions describing research on all aspects of "Cross Lingual Information Access and Retrieval". Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Semantic approaches to cross lingual information access

  • Cross-language cross media search (speech, video, audio)

  • Uses of (statistical) Machine Translation and Transliteration in multilingual information access

  • Search based on language independent forms

  • Cross-language text categorization

  • Multilingual / Cross-lingual named entity recognition

  • Cross-document and crosslingual entity and event coreference

  • Multilingual digital libraries

  • Scalability issues in multilingual information access/ system evaluation

  • Cross Lingual/ Multilingual question answering

  • Appropriate methods to detect similar/complementary/contradictory information across multiple languages

  • Multilingual Summarization

  • Multilingual Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis

  • Multilingual Information Extraction

  • Practical systems on various domains

  • Acquisition of parallel and comparable corpora in multiple languages

  • Morphology and Shallow Parsing for CLIR

  • Query Translation, Query Expansion, Multiword handling and Lightweight WSD for CLIR

  • Other CLIR research issues, user studies / interactive CLIA

Important dates

March 15, 2009 Paper Submission due
March 30, 2009 Notification of acceptance
April 12, 2009  Camera ready papers due
June 4, 2009

 CLIAWS3 Workshop

 

Submission

Papers will be accepted on or before 15 March 2009 in PDF  format via the START system at https://www.softconf.com/ naacl-hlt09/CLIAWS2009/. Submissions should follow the NAACL HLT 2009 length and formatting requirements for full papers of eight (8) pages of content with one (1) extra page for references, found at http://clear.colorado.edu/NAACLHLT2009/stylefiles.html.