Call for Papers
Special topic issue of JASIST: Multilingual information systems 

The next Special Topics Issue of the Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology  (JASIST) is scheduled to come out in
2005 on the topic of Multilingual Information Systems. The guest  editors
for this special issue will be Christopher C. Yang and Wai Lam of The
Chinese University of Hong  Kong.

The information available in languages other than English in the World Wide
Web and global information  systems is increasing significantly. According
to some recent reports, about 50% of Internet users are  English speakers.
However, it is predicted that there will be only a 60% increase in Internet
users among  English speakers versus a 150% growth among non-English
speakers in the near future. There are many  countries in the world using
more than one language as their official languages. For example, Chinese and
English are official languages in Hong Kong; French and English are official
languages in Canada. In the  global economy, information systems are no
longer utilized by users in a single geographical region but all  over the
world. Information can be generated, stored, processed, and accessed in
several different  languages. All of these evidences reveal the importance
of the research in multilingual information systems.

Multilingual information systems have been implemented in different
applications providing a broad range of  services. Handling multiple
languages in multilingual information systems does not merely display the
output  in different languages, but it poses many research challenges. Many
of these systems combine advanced  techniques from information retrieval,
language processing, text mining, machine translation, multilingual
information management, multilingual corpora processing, and intelligent
user interface. The goal is to  allow users to utilize the multilingual
information systems as efficient and effective as the monolingual
information systems.

This special topic issue solicits high-quality innovative papers addressing
significant research questions  related to the broad research area of
multilingual information systems. Special topics of interest include,  but
are not limited to, the following:   
  Crosslingual information retrieval 
  Multilingual searching and browsing 
  Multilingual user interface 
  Machine translation 
  Parallel and comparable corpora 
  Multilingual NLP 
  Intelligent systems on multilingual information 
  Multilingual database 
  Multilingual metadata 
  Knowledge management 
  Multilingual Web services 
  Collaborative multilingual information systems 
  Multilingual electronic commerce systems 
  Multilingual mobile commerce systems 
  Multilingual text indexing 

Inquiries can be made to the guest editor(s) at yang@se.cuhk.edu.hk.

Manuscript submissions (four copies of full articles) should be addressed
to:

Professor Christopher C. Yang
Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, N.T.
Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 2609-8239 Fax: (852) 2603-5505
yang@se.cuhk.edu.hk

Professor Wai Lam
Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, N.T.
Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 2609-8306 Fax: (852) 2603-5505
wlam@se.cuhk.edu.hk

The deadline for accepting manuscripts for consideration for publication in
this special issue is February  29, 2004. All manuscripts will be reviewed
by a select panel of referees, and those accepted will be  published in a
special issue of JASIST. Original artwork and a signed copy of the copyright
release form  will be required for all accepted papers.

A copy of the call for papers will be available on the World Wide Web, as is
further information about  JASIST, at http://www.asis.org/.


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Christopher C. Yang, Associate Professor
Dept. of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
Ho Sin Hang Engineering Building
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 2609 8239
Email: yang@se.cuhk.edu.hk
URL: http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~yang/
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