New directions in multilingual information access

This workshop attempted to present the state-of-the-art in multilingual information access (MLIA) research and development, including cross-language information retrieval and question-answering and multilingual, multi-document summarization. Our goal was to delineate current research areas as well as suggest new areas for future research and development. The workshop also focused on practical issues of scalability and practical application of MLIA in digital libraries and web portals. In addition to an invited keynote, 17 research and position papers were selected for the proceedings which may be found at http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/sigir2006-mlia.htm.