[Corpora-List] MLIA-CULT2010 Workshop at ECIR 2010 - Workshop on Multilinguality in Information Access Evaluation

[Maarten de Rijke]

Call for Papers

Workshop on Multilinguality in Information Access Evaluation (MLIA-CULT
2010)  - Bringing Content, Users, Languages, and Tasks into the Loop

Milton Keynes, UK, March 28, 2010

in conjunction 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 12nd February 2010
	• Notification of Acceptance: Friday 26th February 2010
	• Camera Ready: Wednesday 10th March 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

--
ISLA * University of Amsterdam * http://ilps.science.uva.nl


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