CLEF 2021 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum 21-24 September 2021, Bucharest, Romania http://clef2021.clef-initiative.eu/ [apologies for cross-posting] #Important Dates# (Time zone: Anywhere on Earth) - Submission of All Papers: 3 May 2021 - Notification of Acceptance: 4 June 2021 - Camera Ready Copy due: 25 June 2021 - Conference: 21-24 September 2021 The CLEF Conference addresses all aspects of Information Access in any modality and language. The CLEF conference includes presentation of research papers and a series of workshops presenting the results of lab-based comparative evaluation benchmarks. CLEF 2021 in Bucharest is the 12th year of the CLEF Conference series and the 22nd year of the CLEF initiative as a forum for information retrieval (IR) evaluation. The CLEF conference has a clear focus on experimental IR as carried out within evaluation forums (e.g., CLEF Labs, TREC, NTCIR, FIRE, MediaEval, RomIP, SemEval, and TAC) with special attention to the challenges of multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search also considering specific classes of users as children, students, impaired users in different tasks (e.g., academic, professional, or everyday-life). We invite paper submissions on significant new insights demonstrated on 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 style evaluation 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. CLEF also welcomes past runs/results/data analysis and new data collections. 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 2021 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, data enrichment, etc. - User studies either based on lab studies or crowdsourcing. - Past results/run deep analysis both statistically and fine grain based. - 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 information retrieval 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. - New data collection: presentation of new data collection with potential high impact on future research, specific collections from companies or labs, multilingual collections. - Work on data from rare languages, collaborative, social data. #Format# Authors are invited to electronically submit original papers, which have not been published and are not under consideration elsewhere, using the LNCS proceedings format: http://www.springer.com/it/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines. Two types of papers are solicited: - Long papers: 12 pages max (including references). Aimed to report complete research work. - Short papers: 6 pages max (including references). Position papers, new evaluation proposals, developments and applications, etc. Papers will be peer-reviewed by 3 members of the program committee. Selection will be based on originality, clarity, and technical quality. #Paper submission# Papers should be submitted in PDF format to the following address: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clef2021 #Organizing Committee# General Chairs: Bogdan Ionescu, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania K. Selcuk Candan, Arizona State University, USA Program Chairs: Henning Müller, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, Switzerland Lorraine Goeuriot, Université Grenoble Alpes, France Birger Larsen, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark Lab Chairs: Alexis Joly, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France Maria Maistro, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Florina Piroi, Vienna University of Technology, Austria Publicity Chairs: Liviu-Daniel Stefan, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania Mihai Dogariu, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania Outreach Program Chairs: Yu-Gang Jiang, Fudan University, China - Asian Liaison Hugo Jair Escalante, Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica, Optica y Electronica, Mexico - Central American Liaison Fabio A. Gonzalez, National University of Colombia, Colombia - South American Liaison Ben Herbst, Praelexis, South Africa - African Liaison Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, University of Ottawa, Canada - North American Liaison Industry & Sponsorship Chairs: Seila Abdulamit, Vodafone, Romania Mihai-Gabriel Constantin, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania Bogdan Boteanu, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania Website & Social Media Chairs: Denisa Ionascu, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania Finance Chair: Ion Marghescu, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Romania Proceedings Chairs: Guglielmo Faggioli, University of Padua, Italy Nicola Ferro, University of Padua, Italy ############################ Unsubscribe: [log in to unmask] If you don't already have a password for the LISTSERV.ACM.ORG server, we recommend that you create one now. A LISTSERV password is linked to your email address and can be used to access the web interface and all the lists to which you are subscribed on the LISTSERV.ACM.ORG server. To create a password, visit: https://LISTSERV.ACM.ORG/SCRIPTS/WA-ACMLPX.CGI?GETPW1 Once you have created a password, you can log in and view or change your subscription settings at: https://LISTSERV.ACM.ORG/SCRIPTS/WA-ACMLPX.CGI?SUBED1=MM-INTEREST