<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 14 (filtered medium)">
<style><!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Calibri;
panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;}
@font-face
{font-family:Tahoma;
panose-1:2 11 6 4 3 5 4 4 2 4;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0cm;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}
a:link, span.MsoHyperlink
{mso-style-priority:99;
color:blue;
text-decoration:underline;}
a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed
{mso-style-priority:99;
color:purple;
text-decoration:underline;}
span.EmailStyle17
{mso-style-type:personal;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
color:windowtext;}
span.EmailStyle18
{mso-style-type:personal;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
color:#1F497D;}
span.EmailStyle19
{mso-style-type:personal-reply;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
color:#993366;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
font-size:10.0pt;}
@page WordSection1
{size:612.0pt 792.0pt;
margin:70.85pt 2.0cm 2.0cm 2.0cm;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
--></style><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:shapedefaults v:ext="edit" spidmax="1026" />
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:shapelayout v:ext="edit">
<o:idmap v:ext="edit" data="1" />
</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]-->
</head>
<body lang="IT" link="blue" vlink="purple">
<div class="WordSection1">
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">**Apologies if you receive multiple copies.
</span>Please disseminate as appropriate <span lang="EN-US">**<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12.0pt;color:blue"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">******************************************************************************************************<span style="color:#1F497D">**<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">The registrations to CLEF 2012 Evaluation Labs remain open till May 15.
<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">If you plan to participate in one (or more) Lab(s), please register at
<a href="http://clef2012.org/index.php?page=Pages/registrationForm.php">http://clef2012.org/index.php?page=Pages/registrationForm.php</a><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">*******************************************************************************************************<span style="color:#1F497D">*<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:14.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:14.0pt;color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:14.0pt">CLEF 2012 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span lang="EN-US">Information Access Evaluation meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Visual Analytics<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://clef2012.org/">http://clef2012.org/</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12.0pt">CLEF 2012 Labs - Call for Participation -<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">The CLEF 2012 is next year’s edition of the popular CLEF campaign and workshop series (<a href="http://www.clef-initiative.eu/">http://www.clef-initiative.eu//</a>) which has run since 2000 contributing to the systematic
evaluation of information access systems, primarily through experimentation on shared tasks.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">In 2010 CLEF was launched in a new format, as a conference with research presentations, panels, poster and demo sessions and laboratory evaluation workshops. Labs follow under two types: laboratories to conduct evaluation
of information access systems, and workshops to discuss and pilot innovative evaluation activities.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">In 2012, CLEF will take place in September 17-20 in Rome, and researchers and practitioners from all segments of the information access and related communities are invited to participate to the following Evaluation Labs:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">CHiC - Cultural Heritage in CLEF <o:p>
</o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">The CHiC 2012 pilot evaluation lab aims at moving towards a systematic and large-scale evaluation of cultural heritage digital libraries and information access systems. Data test collections and queries will come from
the cultural heritage domain (in 2012 data from Europeana) and tasks will contain a mix of conventional system-oriented evaluation scenarios (e.g. ad-hoc retrieval and semantic enrichment) for comparison with other domains and a uniquely customized scenario
for the CH domain, i.e. a variability task to present a particular good overview (“must sees”) over the different object types and categories in the collection targeted towards a casual user.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Coordinators</span></b><span lang="EN-US">: Berlin School of Library and Information Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (DE); Department of Information Engineering, U. of Padova (IT); Royal School of Library
and Information Science, Copenhagen (DE); The Information School, U. of Sheffield (UK); Europeana, The Hague, Netherlands (NL)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Webpage</span></b><span lang="EN-US">:
<a href="http://www.promise-noe.eu/chic-2012/home">http://www.promise-noe.eu/chic-2012/home</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">CLEF-IP : IR in the IP domain<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">The CLEF-IP lab provides a large collection of XML documents representing patents and patent images. On this collection we organize the following four tasks:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Passage Retrieval starting from claims: Starting from a given claim, we ask to retrieve relevant documents in the collection and mark out the relevant passages in these documents.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Matching Claim to description in a single document (Pilot): Starting from the claims of an patent application, we ask to indicate the paragraphs in the application's description section (same document) that best explain
the contents of the given claim.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Flowchart Recognition Task: Extract the information in flowchart images and return it in a predefined textual format.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Chemical Structure Recognition Task. Starting from TIFF images containing patent scans, we ask to identify the location of the chemical structures depicted on these pages and, for each of them, return the corresponding
structure in a MOL file (a chemical structure file format).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Coordinators</span></b><span lang="EN-US">: Vienna University of Technology (AT), SAIC-Frederick Inc. (US), Fraunhofer SCAI (DE), U. of Birmingham (UK).
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Webpage</span></b><span lang="EN-US">:
<a href="http://ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~clef-ip/">http://ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~clef-ip/</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">ImageCLEF - Cross Language Image Retrieval<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">This lab evaluates the cross-language annotation and retrieval of images by focusing on the combination of textual and visual evidence. Four challenging tasks are foreseen:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Medical task: image modality classification and image retrieval with visual, semantic and mixed topics in several languages, using a data collection from the biomedical literature;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Photo annotation and retrieval: semantic concept detection and concept-based retrieval using Flickr data, and large-scale annotation using general Web data;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Plant identification: visual classification of leaf images for the identification of plant species;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Robot vision: semantic localisation of a mobile robot using multimodal place classification, with special focus on generalization.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Coordinators</span></b><span lang="EN-US">: IDIAP (CH), National Library of Medicine (US), U. of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (CH), CEA LIST (FR), Harvard Medical School (US), Yahoo! Research (ES), Nuance
Communications (US), INRA-AMAP (FR), INRIA (FR), U. Politècnica de Valencia (ES).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Webpage</span></b><span lang="EN-US">:
<a href="http://www.imageclef.org/">http://www.imageclef.org/</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">INEX - INitiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">INEX has been pioneering structured retrieval since 2002, and will join forces with CLEF. running five tracks:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Social Book Search Track: studying the value of user-generated descriptions in addition to formal metadata on a collection of Amazon Books and LibraryThing.com data.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Data Centric Track: studying adhoc search and facetted search on a collection of Linked Data (DBpedia) tied to a large corpus (Wikipedia).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Snippet Retrieval Track: studying the generation of informative snippets with sufficient information to determine the relevancy of search results.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Show Me Your Code Track: asking participants to submit system components (in particular feedback) rather than results.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Tweet Contextualization Track: retrieving synthetic contextual information from Wikipedia in response to a tweet with a URL on a small terminal like a phone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Coordinators</span></b><span lang="EN-US">: Queensland University of Technology (AU), University of Amsterdam (NL), Saarland University/MPI (DE), and the track organizers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Webpage</span></b><span lang="EN-US">:
<a href="http://inex.mmci.uni-saarland.de/">http://inex.mmci.uni-saarland.de/</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">PAN - Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Social Software Misuse<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">PAN offers three tasks:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Plagiarism Detection. This task features a new plagiarism corpus based on the ClueWeb09, the new search engine ChatNoir which indexes the corpus, the cloud-based algorithm evaluation architecture TIRA, and for the first
time, real plagiarism cases. At the conference, keynotes about cross-language plagiarism detection will be held by Roberto Navigli (Università La Sapienza), and Ralf Steinberger (European Commission, JRC).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Author Identification. This task focuses on identifying sexual predators in chat logs and on authorship verification. Moreover, it features for the first time real cases of disputed authorship.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Quality Flaw Prediction in Wikipedia. This task is newly introduced, and it is about identifying Wikipedia articles which contain certain information quality flaws. It generalizes the vandalism detection task of last
year.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Coordinators</span></b><span lang="EN-US">: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (DE), U. Politécnica de Valencia (ES), U. of the Aegean (GR), Bar-Ilan University (IL), Illinois Institute of Technology (US), Duquesne University
(US), and U. of Lugano (CH).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab web page</span></b><span lang="EN-US">:
<a href="http://pan.webis.de">http://pan.webis.de</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">QA4MRE- Question Answering for Machine Reading Evaluation
<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">The goal of QA4MRE is to evaluate Machine Reading abilities through Question Answering and Reading Comprehension Tests. The task focuses on the reading of single documents and the identification of the answers to a set
of questions about information that is stated or implied in the text. Questions are in the form of multiple choice, each having five options, and only one correct answer. The participating systems will be required to answer the questions by choosing in each
case one answer from the five alternatives. Systems should be able to use knowledge from given texts which may be used to assist with answering the questions, anyway, the principal answer is to be found among the facts contained in the test documents given.
Two additional pilots are also proposed:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Processing Modality and Negation for Machine Reading: aimed at evaluating whether systems are able to understand extra-propositional aspects of meaning like modality and negation.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">- Machine Reading of Biomedical Texts about Alzheimer: aimed at setting questions in the biomedical domain with a special focus on the Alzheimer disease.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Coordinators</span></b><span lang="EN-US">: UNED (ES), ISI (US), CELCT (IT), University of Limerick (IE), University of Antwerp (BE).
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Webpage</span></b><span lang="EN-US">:
<a href="http://celct.fbk.eu/QA4MRE/">http://celct.fbk.eu/QA4MRE/</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">RepLab 2012<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Online Reputation Management deals with the image that online media project about individuals and organizations. The aim is to bring together the Information Access research community with representatives from the Online
Reputation Management industry, with the goals of (i) establishing a five-year roadmap that includes a description of the language technologies required in terms of resources, algorithms, and applications; (ii) specifying suitable evaluation methodologies
and metrics; and (iii) developing of test collections that enable systematic comparison of algorithms and reliable benchmarking of commercial systems. Two shared tasks on Twitter data are offered:
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">(i) a monitoring task, where the goal is to thematically cluster tweets including a company's name as a step towards early alerting on issues that may damage the company's reputation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">(ii) a profiling task, where the goal is annotating tweets according to their polarity for reputation (i.e. as to whether their content has positive/negative implications for the company's reputation).
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Coordinators</span></b><span lang="EN-US">: Llorente & Cuenca, U. Amsterdam, UNED<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Webpage</span></b><span lang="EN-US">:
<a href="http://www.limosine-project.eu/events/replab2012">http://www.limosine-project.eu/events/replab2012</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">WORKSHOP<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">CLEFeHealth 2012<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">CLEFeHealth 2012 is a one-day workshop on cross-language evaluation of methods, applications, and resources for eHealth document analysis with a focus on written and spoken natural-language processing. We invite research,
industry and government representatives to develop with us a roadmap towards the vision of using systematically evaluated ICT tools to analyse and integrate eHealth documents across languages, genres, and jargons. We call for 1-2 page abstracts on: (a) evaluation
of mono-and multilingual methods, applications <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">and resources for eHealth document analysis; and (b) development of statistical and user-feedback based evaluation protocols, settings, methods and measures for cross-language evaluation of methods, applications, and
resources for eHealth document analysis. We have a double-blind review process, so please note that the submission deadline is May 2012.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Coordinators</span></b><span lang="EN-US">: National ICT Australia (NICTA)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">Lab Webpage</span></b><span lang="EN-US">:
<a href="http://www.nicta.com.au/clefehealth2012">www.nicta.com.au/clefehealth2012</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:navy;mso-fareast-language:IT">================================</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:blue;mso-fareast-language:IT"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:navy;mso-fareast-language:IT">Pamela Forner<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:navy;mso-fareast-language:IT">CELCT (web:
</span><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:blue;mso-fareast-language:IT"><a href="http://www.celct.it/" title="http://www.celct.it"><span lang="EN-GB">www.celct.it</span></a></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:navy;mso-fareast-language:IT">)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:navy;mso-fareast-language:IT">Center for the Evaluation of Language and Communication Technologies<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:navy;mso-fareast-language:IT">Via alla Cascata 56/c
</span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:blue;mso-fareast-language:IT"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:navy;mso-fareast-language:IT">38100 Povo – TRENTO –Italy<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:navy;mso-fareast-language:IT"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:navy;mso-fareast-language:IT">email:
</span><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:blue;mso-fareast-language:IT"><a href="mailto:forner@celct.it" title="mailto:fordyce@celct.it"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"">forner@celct.it</span></a></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;color:blue;mso-fareast-language:IT"><br>
</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:navy;mso-fareast-language:IT">tel.: +39 0461 314 804</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:blue;mso-fareast-language:IT"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:navy;mso-fareast-language:IT">fax: +39 0461 314 846</span><span style="color:blue;mso-fareast-language:IT"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:blue;mso-fareast-language:IT"> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:navy;mso-fareast-language:IT">Secretary Phone: +39 0461 314 870</span><span style="mso-fareast-language:IT"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
</div>
</body>
</html>