Call for Papers


CLEF 2016: Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum

Information Access Evaluation meets Multilinguality, Multimodality and Interaction

5-8 September 2016, Évora - Portugal


Submission Deadlines: (April 24) May 1, 2016 (long papers), May 1 (short papers)

http://clef2016.clef-initiative.eu/


The CLEF Conference addresses all aspects of Information Access in any modality and language. The conference is teamed up with a series of workshops presenting the results of lab-based comparative evaluation. CLEF 2016 is the 7th year of the CLEF Conference and the 17th year of the CLEF initiative as a forum for IR Evaluation. The CLEF conference has a clear focus on experimental IR as done at the evaluation forums (CLEF Labs, TREC, NTCIR, FIRE, MediaEval, RomIP, SemEval, TAC, ...) with special attention to the challenges of multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search. We invite submissions on significant new insights demonstrated on the resulting IR test collections, on analysis of IR test collections and evaluation measures, as well as on concrete proposals to push the boundaries of the Cranfield/TREC/CLEF paradigm.

All submissions to the CLEF main conference will be reviewed on the basis of relevance, originality, importance, and clarity. CLEF welcomes papers that describe rigorous hypothesis testing regardless of whether the results are positive or negative. Methods are expected to be written so that they are reproducible by others, and the logic of the research design is clearly described in the paper. The conference proceedings will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).


Topics

Relevant topics for the CLEF 2016 Conference include but are not limited to:

  • Information Access in any language or modality: Information retrieval, image retrieval, question answering, search interfaces and design, infrastructures, etc.
  • Analytics for Information Retrieval: theoretical and practical results in the analytics field that are specifically targeted for information access data analysis.
  • Evaluation Initiatives: Conclusions, lessons learned, impact and projection of any evaluation initiative after completing their cycle.
  • Evaluation: methodologies, metrics, statistical and analytical tools, component based, user groups and use cases, ground-truth creation, impact of multilingual/multicultural/multimodal differences, etc.
  • Technology Transfer: Economic impact/sustainability of information access approaches, deployment and exploitation of systems, use cases, etc.
  • Interactive Information Retrieval Evaluation: the interactive evaluation of IR systems using user-centered methods, evaluation of novel search interfaces, novel interactive evaluation methods, simulation of interaction, etc.
  • Specific Application Domains: Information access and its evaluation in application domains such as cultural heritage, digital libraries, social media, expert search, health information, legal documents, patents, news, books, plants, etc.


Format

Authors are invited to submit electronically original papers, which have not been published and are not under consideration elsewhere, using the LNCS proceedings format:

Two types of papers are solicited:

  • Long papers: 12 pages max. Aimed to report complete research works.
  • Short papers: 6 pages max. Position papers, new evaluation proposals, developments and applications, etc.

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:


Dates

  • Submission of Long Papers: (April 24) May 1, 2016
  • Submission of Short Papers: May 1, 2016
  • Notification of Acceptance: (May 31) June 3, 2016
  • Camera Ready Copy due: June 17, 2016
  • Conference: September 5-8, 2016


Organization

Conference Chairs:

  • Norbert Fuhr, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

  • Paulo Quaresma, University of Évora, Portugal

Program Chairs:

  • Birger Larsen, University of Aalborg, Denmark

  • Teresa Gonçalves, University of Évora, Portugal

Lab chairs:

  • Craig Macdonald, University of Glasgow, UK

  • Krisztian Balog, University of Stavenger, Norway

Proceedings Chairs:

  • Linda Cappellato, University of Padua, Italy

  • Nicola Ferro, University of Padua, Italy