ROMIP'2008: Call for Participation

                  Call for Participation ROMIP'2008
     The Sixth Russian Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar
                     April 2008 - October 2008
                      http://www.romip.ru/en

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Registration is now open for ROMIP'2008. 
In addition to several text retrieval tracks on the basis of large scale 
Russian language collections, this year ROMIP program includes 
2 new image retrieval tracks.

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The Russian Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar (ROMIP) is an annual
retrieval system evaluation campaign that is in many respects similar 
to other world information retrieval forums such as TREC, CLEF, NTCIR.

The distinctive features of ROMIP are:
  * Focus on problems of information retrieval in Russian language
  * Unique large scale Russian language collections
  * Tracks that are not available in other related initiatives

The seminar is a perfect opportunity to check your information retrieval and
natural language processing approaches and algorithms using industry
standard evaluation methodologies. The leading Russian IR researchers and
companies traditionally participate in the seminar and you will be able
objectively compare your results with theirs.

The final workshop will be held in conjunction with RCDL'2008 (http://rcdl.ru) and will
October, 2008, in Dubna, Russia.

Official languages: Russian and English

Tracks
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  * Ad hoc text retrieval
      - in a collection of Web pages
      - in a collection of legal documents
      - in a mixed collection
  * Text classification
      - of legal documents
      - of Web sites
      - of Web pages
  * News clustering
  * Query-biased summarization
  * Search by sample document or text fragment
  * Fact extraction from news
  * Image tracks
      - Content based image retrieval
      - Near duplicate detection

A detailed track description is available on the the ROMIP website (http://romip.ru).

ROMIP Test Collections
----------------------

  * Web collection Narod.Ru (700.000 documents)
  * Web collection KM.Ru 2007 (3.000.000 documents)
  * Web collection By.web 2007 (1.500.000 documents)
  * Web collection DMOZ (300.000 documents)
  * Collection of Legal documents 2007 (300.000 documents)
  * News collection  (31.500 documents from 25 news agencies)
  * Image collection (approx. 20.000+ images, Flickr based)

The text collections are in Russian language. Image collection is language
independent. The test queries sets for retrieval tasks are from logs of popular search
engines.

For further details about the collections please see the ROMIP web site.
(http://romip.ru)

Important dates
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Requests for participation: May 12, 2008
Collection and task delivery: May 26, 2008
Submission of results: up to July 15, 2008 
Result of evaluation: August 15, 2008 
Paper submission: September 10, 2008 
Workshop: October  7-11, 2008

How to participate
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Please submit your application to [email protected] and provide the following
information:

  * List of tracks you are interested in
  * Contacts (organization, email of contact person)
  * Name and brief description of the system/team
    to be published on the ROMIP website

Organizing committee
--------------------
   Mikhail Ageev (Moscow State University, Russia)
   Alexander Antonov (Galaktika-Zoom, Moscow, Russia)
   Pavel Braslavski (Yandex, Ekaterinburg, Russia)
   Maxim Gubin (IAC Search & Media, USA)
   Boris Dobrov (UIS RUSSIA, Moscow, Russia)
   Mikhail Kostin (Mail.Ru, Moscow, Russia)
   Igor Kuralenok (St Petersburg State University, Russia)
   Igor Nekrestyanov (St Petersburg State University, Russia)
   Marina Nekrestyanova (Nebuad, St. Petersburg, Russia)
   Vladimir Pleshko (RCO, Moscow, Russia)
   Ilya Segalovich (Yandex, Moscow, Russia)
   Vlad Shabanov (Vertical Search, Moscow, Russia)
   Natalia Vassilieva (HP Labs, Russia)

Further details
---------------

Web site: http://romip.ru

Please send your questions to the ROMIP forum
(http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/romip) or directly to organizers
([email protected]).