Information access in a multilingual world: transitioning from research to real-world applications

This report constitutes the proceedings of the workshop on Information Access in a Multilingual World: Transitioning from Research to Real-World Applications}, held at SIGIR 2009 in Boston, July 23, 2009. Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) is at a turning point wherein substantial real-world applications are being introduced after fifteen years of research into cross-language information retrieval, question answering, statistical machine translation and named entity recognition. Previous workshops on this topic have focused on research and small-scale applications. The focus of this workshop was on technology transfer from research to applications and on what future research needs to be done which facilitates MLIA in an increasingly connected multilingual world