Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Cross Lingual Information Access Addressing the Information Need of Multilingual Societies - CLIAWS3 '09

Abstract

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 Lingual Information Access is concerned with technologies that let users express their query in their native language, and irrespective of the language in which the information is available, present their 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. In recent times, 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) was organized 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 third international workshop on Cross Lingual Information Access 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 present workshop includes an invited keynote talk, presentations of technical papers selected after peer review followed by a panel discussion.