SIGIR 2007 Workshop
               "Improving Web retrieval for non-English queries"
                          Amsterdam - 27 July 2007

                      http://rea.teimes.gr/~lazarinf/ir7w/

Workshop Theme:
==============

Over 60% of the online population are non-English speakers and it is
probable the number of non-English speakers is growing faster than
English speakers. Recent studies showed that non-English queries and
unclassifiable queries have nearly tripled since 1997. Most search
engines were originally engineered for English. They do not take full
account of inflectional semantics nor, for example, diacritics or the
use of capitals.

The main conclusion from the literature is that searching using
non-English and non-Latin based queries results in lower success and
requires additional user effort so as to achieve acceptable recall and
precision. Further international search engines (like Yahoo and
Google) are relatively weaker with monolingual non-English queries.

New tools and resources are needed to support researchers in
non-English retrieval. New methodologies need to be proposed which
will help the identification of problems in existing search
engines. New teaching strategies should be formed aiding users to
become more efficient in formulating their queries.

Aims and Topics:
===============

The main objectives of the workshop are to propose techniques and to
evaluate tools which improve the effectiveness of the existing search
engines. The specific aims of the workshop are:

    * Evaluate search engines in non-English queries and measure the
      additional user effort.
    
    * Define methodologies for evaluating the effectiveness of search
     engines in non-English queries.  

    * Study the user query patterns in non-English Web retrieval. 

    * Identify the factors that influence utilization of search
      engines in a multicultural world.

    * Propose extensions to the search engines to improve non-English
      Web retrieval.

    * Propose teaching strategies for helping users improve their
      searching behaviour.

    * Identify how standard IR techniques (Indexing, Query
      representation, Query reformulation, etc) can be adapted in Web
      retrieval for non-English languages. 

    * Discuss the application of natural language processing
      techniques for non-English Web IR.



Workshop areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

    * Evaluation methodologies
    * Analysis of query logs
    * Localization of search engine interfaces
    * Performance issues of local search engines
    * User studies
    * Image and video retrieval services
    * Summarization
    * Teaching 

Invited speaker:
===============

    To be announced


Journal publication:
===================

Authors of best papers will be invited to submit extended versions of
their papers for a special issue of an international journal.


Submissions:
===========

Authors are invited to submit full papers (not exceeding 8 pages) in
PDF format using the ACM template page.

Please send the PDF file by email to both Fotis Lazarinis (lazarinf AT
teimes.gr) and to Jesus Vilares (jvilares AT udc.es)

Important Dates
25 May 2007 	    	Paper submissions due
15 June 2007 	    	Notifications of acceptance
22 June 2007 	    	Camera-ready copy due
27 July 2007 	    	Workshop

 
Sponsorship:
===========

The workshop is partially funded by:

"Rede Galega de Procesamento da Linguaxe e Recuperacion de Informacion"
(Galician Network for Language Processing and Information Retrieval),
funded by Xunta de Galicia"


Workshop Chairs:
===============
 

*  Fotis Lazarinis, Technological Educational Institute, Mesolongli, Greece

*  Jesus Vilares Ferro, University of A Coruna, Spain

*  John Tait, University of Sunderland, UK

 

Programme committee (alphabetically):
===================
 

1. Miguel Alonso  (Univ. A Coruna, Spain)

2. Theodore Dalamagas (National Technical Univ. of Athens, Greece)

3. Chu-Ren Huang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan)

4. Ghassan Kanaan (Yarmouk University, Jordan)

5. Noriko Kando  (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)

6. Chen Kuang-hua (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)

7. David Losada  (Univ. Santiago de Compostela, Spain)

8. Alexandros Ntoulas (Microsoft Search Labs, USA)

9. Doug Oard   (Univ.  of Maryland, USA)

10. Gabriel Pereira (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)

11. Carol Peters  (ISTI-CNR, Italy)

12. Owen Rambow (Columbia University, USA)

13. Mark Sanderson (Univ. of Sheffield, UK)

14. Jacques Savoy (Univ.  of Neuchatel, Switzerland)

15. Nasredine Semmar (LIC2M/CEA-LIST, France)

16. Min Song (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA)

17. Sofia Stamou  (Univ. of Patras, Greece)

18. Richard Sutcliffe (Univ. Limerick, Ireland)

19. Manuel Vilares (Univ. Vigo, Spain)