First Call for Papers for .New Directions in Multilingual Information Access. A Workshop at SIGIR 2006: 29th International Conference on Research And Development in Information Retrieval , 10 August 2006, Seattle, USA (http://www.sigir2006.org/) Chairs: Fredric Gey, Noriko Kando, Carol Peters, Chin-Yew Lin A successful workshop on "Cross-Language Information Retrieval: A Research Roadmap" was held at SIGIR 2002 in Finland (see http://ucdata.berkeley.edu:7101/sigir-2002/). The 2002 workshop attempted to establish a research agenda in Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) for the next 5 years. The 2006 workshop will review and renew this vision. Since 2002, research has been vigorously pursued and interesting results achieved not only in cross-language information retrieval through the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) and NTCIR Asian Language Retrieval and Question-answering Workshop, but also in multilingual summarization workshops and cross-language named entity extraction challenges by the Association for Computational Linguistics and the Geographic Information retrieval (GeoCLEF) track of CLEF. Another major issue is how to transition research results into practice. This challenge has become more compelling as recent digital content initiatives by Google, Yahoo and MSN have inspired the European Commission to launch an effort aimed at building The European Library. Enabling multilingual access to the contents of Europe's national libraries will play a major role. At the same time, the Quaero project for the development of a European search engine was announced last summer by the French president Jacques Chirac. Similarly, in Asia, governments are concerned about the hegemony of US based search engines. One goal of this workshop will be to explore whether the research community is ready to meet the challenges posed by these major initiatives. Can current prototype systems scale up or meet the requirements of content and usage that such programs imply? What is needed to move from the lab to the real world, in terms of research, resources and equipment? How much more attention needs to be paid to presentation of multilingual results? It is time for the research and application communities to get together and examine these questions in depth. To this end, our opening invited talk will be by Dr David A Evans, CEO of Clairvoyance Corporation on the topic .From R&D to practice -- challenges to multilingual information access in the real world. This workshop will thus have a broad scope including both research questions and application issues. Presentations will focus on both research and practical issues. One aim of the workshop will be to suggest guidelines for transfer of research technology into practice. Suggested topics include but are not limited to: Multilingual summarization, Cross-language cross-media search (speech, video, audio), Uses of statistical MT in multilingual information access, Less-commonly taught languages, Cross-language text categorization, other CLIR research issues, Multilingual named entity recognition, Multilingual digital libraries, scalability issues in multilingual information access. Two kinds of papers are sought: Short position papers (maximum 4 pages) which focus on particular areas and argue a vision of the future in the area. Longer research scope papers (up to 10 pages) which provide depth and background as well as a research vision. All papers will be reviewed by a program committee and a limited number selected for presentation at the workshop. IMPORTANT DATES: May 22, 2006 Papers submitted electronically to Chairs. June 14, 2006 Notice of acceptance or rejections of papers sent to Authors July 1, 2006 Final papers submitted for workshop notebook to be distributed at workshop August 10, 2006 Workshop held in Seattle, USA Fredric C. Gey University of California, Berkeley, USA gey@berkeley.edu Noriko Kando National Institute of Informatics, Japan kando@nii.ac.jp Carol Peters Italian National Research Council, Italy carol.peters@isti.cnr.it Chin-Yew Lin Microsoft Research Asia, China cyl@microsoft.com