[Please distribute, sorry for multiple copies] Call for Participation Handwritten Scanned Document Retrieval Challenge @ ImageCLEF 2016 http://imageclef.org/2016/handwritten We cordially invite you to participate in a new evaluation campaign aimed at the development of systems for textual-query retrieval from historical handwritten collections. The evaluation will be characterized by the following key challenges: - Multi-word queries. - Finding broken words due to hyphenation. - Queries with words not seen in the training data. - Queries with zero relevant results. - Results in the transitions between pages. - Proximity searching. The evaluation tries to allow easy participation from different research communities, with the aim of having synergies and providing different ideas and solutions to the problems being addressed. In particular, we hope to have participation at least from groups working on: handwritten text recognition, image-based keyword spotting and text retrieval. The primary training/development information will consist in the original page images and transcripts. This can be directly used by researchers working on keyword spotting. Moreover, word bounding boxes will be provided for the convenience of groups that work on query-by-example keyword spotting. In addition to the original page images and transcripts, plain text n-best recognition lists will be provided, to allow easy participation of researchers that normally work with text only. The participants will have a chance to submit a paper describing their systems, which will be peer reviewed and if accepted, published in the CEUR-WS proceedings. Furthermore, the groups of the best performing systems will be invited to give an oral presentation at CLEF 2016 and others will be given the option of presenting a poster. Attendance to CLEF is not mandatory (though recommended) for participating or the papers being published. This challenge is being organized as part of ImageCLEF, a lab of CLEF 2016 (http://clef2016.clef-initiative.eu). Any questions or comments you may have, feel free to contact us. For more details on the evaluation please visit http://imageclef.org/2016/handwritten Schedule: 15.11.2015: registration opens (until 22.04.2016) 16.12.2015: release of training/development data 15.03.2016: release of test data 01.05.2016: deadline for submission of runs by the participants 15.05.2016: release of processed results by the task organizers 25.05.2016: deadline for submission of working notes papers 17.06.2016: notification of acceptance of the working notes papers 01.07.2016: camera ready working notes papers 05.-08.09.2016: CLEF 2016, Évora, Portugal Organizing Committee: Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain - Joan Puigcerver - Alejandro H. Toselli - Joan Andreu Sánchez - Enrique Vidal - Mauricio Villegas