Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have much in common: both deal with natural language and texts. Many interactions between the IR and NLP communities would thus been expected. Yet, apart from some notable exceptions, they have evolved quite independently for a long time, separately developing their own sets of techniques and knowledge, with few fruitful contacts.
However, stronger interactions between them seem inexorable. This is due, first, to the emerging needs: in the era of big data, we have both to cope with a large quantity of texts and to make sense of it. This is also due to the fact that the convergence of data science techniques, including machine learning and probabilistic approaches, provides them with common foundations in terms of tools and culture.
This special issue of TAL aims at providing a forum on the latest developments on the convergence of NLP and IR by soliciting papers dealing with the interactions between the two fields. These papers can present studies combining NLP and IR in different applications (for example, approaches of IR used for NLP tasks, NLP methods applied to IR problems, processing of noisy data from social media...). They can also focus on more fundamental problems concerning the NLP/IR dichotomy, its evolution and convergence (for example, what role should NLP play in IR and vice versa? Should NLP used in IR be different from general NLP? Generic approaches for NLP and IR...).
Relevant topics include:
NLP techniques for IR
Use of IR techniques for NLP
Rich text representation for IR; for example, deep learning and continuous representations (word embedding)
Cross-lingual IR
Semantic IR
Linguistic resources for IR
IR in specialized domains, terminology for IR
Fine-grain IR, question answering
NLP for multimedia IR, NLP for IR in social networks
Text entailment and reasoning for IR
Large scale IR and NLP, big data
etc.
TO NOTE
IMPORTANT DATES (TEMPTATIVE)
July 15, 2015: Abstract submission deadline
July 31, 2015: Article submission deadline
July 7, 2015: Submission deadline
October 1, 2015: First notification to authors
October 31, 2015: Revised submission
November 30, 2015: Final notification
December 30, 2015: Final version
Beginning of 2016: Publishing
THE JOURNAL
TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues / Natural Language Processing) is a forty year old international journal published by ATALA (French Association for Natural Language Processing) with the support of CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research). It has moved to an electronic mode of publication, with printing on demand. This affects in no way its reviewing and selection process.
