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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:
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Semantic
approaches to cross lingual information access
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Cross-language cross media search (speech, video, audio)
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Uses of (statistical) Machine Translation and Transliteration in
multilingual information access
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Search based on language independent forms
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Cross-language text categorization
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Multilingual / Cross-lingual named entity recognition
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Cross-document and crosslingual entity and event coreference
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Multilingual digital libraries
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Scalability issues in multilingual information access/ system
evaluation
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Cross Lingual/ Multilingual question answering
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Appropriate methods to detect similar/complementary/contradictory information across multiple languages
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Multilingual Summarization
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Multilingual Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis
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Multilingual Information Extraction
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Practical systems on various domains
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Acquisition of parallel and comparable corpora in multiple
languages
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Morphology and Shallow Parsing for CLIR
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Query Translation, Query Expansion, Multiword handling and
Lightweight WSD for CLIR
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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 |
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