Multilingual and Multifaceted Interactive Information Access

MUMIA COST action: The tremendous power and speed of current search engines to respond, almost instantaneously to millions of user queries on a daily basis is one of the greatest successes of the past decade. While this technology empowers users need to extract relevant information from the hundreds of thousands of terabytes of existing data available on the web, the next decade presents many new grand challenges. This next wave of search technology is faced with even greater demands, not only in terms of volume of requests, but also in terms of the changes to the content available, and the dynamics of Web 2.0+ data being produced. These increased and new demands mean that search technology must be able to search, filter, extract, combine, integrate, and process multiple and distributed sources of multilingual content, delivered to an even wider global audience and variety of population. Inevitably, Multilingual and Multifaceted Interactive Information Access (MUMIA) research and development will be a key part of the next generation of search technology. Machine Translation (MT), Information Retrieval (IR) and Multifaceted Interactive Information Access (MIIA) are three disciplines which address the main components of MUMIA. However, relevant research, which is vitally important for the development of next generation search systems, is fragmented.

MUMIA coordinates the collaboration between these disciplines, fostering research and technology transfer in these areas and play an important role in the definition of the future of search. To form a common basis for collaboration the domain of patent retrieval has been selected as a use case, as it provides highly sophisticated and information intensive search tasks that have significant economic ramifications. MUMIA explores innovative frameworks to empower the synergies from the disparate research fields of MT/IR/MIIA within the specific context of patent search and other next generation Web applications