The development of digital and online information repositories is creating many opportunities and also new problems in information retrieval. Online documents are available internationally in many different languages. This makes it possible for users to directly access previously unimagined sources of information. However in conventional information retrieval systems the user must enter a search query in the language of the documents in order to retrieve it. This requires that the user can formulate his/her queries in all possible languages and can decipher documents returned by the retrieval process. This restriction clearly limits the amount and type of information which an individual user really has access to.

Cross-language information retrieval enables users to enter queries in languages they are fluent in, and uses language translation methods to retrieve documents originally written in other languages. Cross-Language Information Access is an extension of the Cross-Language Information Retrieval paradigm. Users who are unfamiliar with the language of documents retrieved are often unable to obtain relevant information from these documents. The objective of Cross-Language Information Access is to introduce additional post retrieval processing to enable users make sense of these retrieved documents. This additional processing may take the form of machine translation of snippets, summarization and subsequent translation of summaries and/or information extraction.

In the past five years, research in Cross Lingual Information Access has been vigorously pursued through the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF), NTCIR Asian Language Retrieval, Question-answering Workshop and such other fora. Significant results have been obtained in multilingual summarization workshops and cross-language named entity extraction challenges by the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) and the Geographic Information retrieval (GeoCLEF) track of CLEF.

This workshop aims to bring together various trends in cross and multi-lingual information retrieval and access. It will provide a comprehensive survey of the state of the art technology and systems, and present emerging technologies in this domain. We will bring together ideas from academia, government, and industry to cover a broad spectrum of applications and views. The workshop will consist of a set of invited talks and presentations of technical papers which will be selected after peer review from the submissions received.