MLIA-CULT2010 Workshop at ECIR 2010 - Call for Papers
From: Vittore Casarosa <casarosa_at_isti.cnr.it>
Call for Papers
MLIA-CULT2010
Workshop on Multilinguality in Information Access Evaluation
In connection with ECIR 2010
*** Apologies for cross-posting***
=========================================================================
> Workshop on Multilinguality in Information Access Evaluation (MLIA-CULT 2010)
> Bringing Content, Users, Languages, and Tasks into the Loop
> 28 March 2010, Milton Keynes, UK
> in connection with the
> 32nd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2010)
>
> http://www.europeanaconnect.eu/MLIACULT10Workshop.php
>
> Aim and Scope
> Services and users of multilingual IR systems continue to evolve, with many new factors
and trends influencing the field. E.g., we are moving to a situation in which there is no
longer a single dominant language in which most online information is captured and, with
the advance of broadband access and the evolution of both wired and wireless connectivity,
users are not just information consumers, but also producers. Text now comes in many
shapes—user generated, with low publishing threshold, heavily contextualised, often code
switching and multi-lingual, and under little or no editorial control, changes the scene
for much of the processing frameworks we previously have been able to assume: blogs,
discussion forums, comments left behind on news sites, IM, SMS, Twitter—many new formats
for textual interaction carry valuable and timely information, which needs specific tools
for processing.
>
> The expectations and habits of users are constantly changing, together with the ways in
which they interact with content and services, often creating new and original ways of
exploiting them. The use of national languages on global networks is increasing rapidly
and language barriers are no longer seen as impossible to overcome but there is growing
dissatisfaction with technologies currently available to realize this. As they live ever
larger parts of their life online, users need to be able to co-operate and communicate in
a way that crosses language boundaries and goes beyond simple translation from one
language to another. Users are very diverse in their interpretations of what a query means
to them—this issue of interpretation is amplified when crossing language boundaries where
the cultural context and norms behind a language have to be taken into account.
Interestingly, this issue gives rise to a new type of user need in the setting of large
volumes of dynamically changing user generated content: needs for subjective information
(“What do people think about …?” and “How do people respond to …?”)
>
> If we are to continue advancing the state-of-the-art in multilingual information access
technologies, we need to understand a new breed of users, performing different kinds of
tasks within varying domains, often acting within communities to find and produce
information not only for themselves, but also to share with other users. This calls for a
re-orientation of methodology and goals in the evaluation of multilingual information
access systems. We need to study and evaluate multilingual issues from a communicative
perspective rather than a purely translational one. Clearly, data is a critical resource
for these aims—how to obtain it?
>
> The goal of the workshop is to discuss and start understanding and improving the
multilingual user experience. How can we move evaluation of multilingual information
access (MLIA) systems beyond system benchmarking in the Cranfield/TREC-style tradition to
assessing system effectiveness within today’s operational task contexts? Among other
things, the workshop will explore the idea of “multilingual living laboratories” in which
to conduct user studies at scale, where infrastructure and instruments for capturing user
activity are created. The workshop will be organized around four key dimensions:
(multilingual) content, (multilingual) users, (multilingual) tasks and (multilingual)
evaluation methodology.
>
> Topics for Discussion
> Relevant topics for the MLIA-CULT 2010 include, but are not limited to:
>
> * Proposals for, or experiences with, living laboratories for retrieval evaluation
> * Evaluation of MLIA systems via user-centric tasks;
> * User & usability indications for multilingual access;
> * Analysis of the impact of multilingual/multicultural differences on
interface/search design;
> * Evaluation and exploitation of contextual information retrieval and multilinguality;
> * Evaluation protocols for taking part in the creation of collaborative MLIA
experiments;
> * Requirements for MLIA systems evaluation by stakeholders (search engines,
enterprise portals, digital libraries, …);
> * Evaluation of information access on multilingual, user-generated, and fragmentary
content;
> * Multilinguality in social media and relevant application communities, such as the
digital library one;
> * Infrastructures and frameworks for supporting, automating, and cooperating in
MLIA systems evaluation.
>
> Important Dates
>
> * Submission Deadline: Friday 15th January 2010
> * Notification of Acceptance: Monday 15th February 2010
> * Camera Ready: Friday 26th February 2010
> * Workshop: Sunday 28th March 2010.
>
> Format
> Authors are invited to submit electronically original papers, which have not been
published and are not under consideration elsewhere, using the ACM SIG proceedings format
( http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates).
>
> Two types of papers are solicited:
>
> * long papers: 8 pages max;
> * short papers: 4 pages max.
>
> Papers will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 members of the program committee. Selection
will be based on originality, clarity, and technical quality.
>
> Papers should be submitted in PDF format to the following address:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mliacult2010
>
> Organisers
> The workshop co-chairs are:
>
> * Nicola Ferro, University of Padova, Italy – ferro_at_dei.unipd.it
> * Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands – derijke_at_uva.nl
Received on Thu Dec 10 2009 - 14:07:53 EST