Dear all,

Following the first successful shared task called "Benchmark for Enhancing
the Standard of Thai language processing (BEST) 2009: Thai Word Segmentation
Software Contest", we are encouraging you to participate in the second
shared task, "InterBEST 2009 Thai Word Segmentation: an International
Episode".

This special contest challenges everyone all over the world who works on
string segmentation to solve the problem of Thai word segmentation. Thai has
been considered one of the most difficult languages for text processing due
to its absence of syllable, word, and even sentence boundary markers. The
ambiguity in segmenting texts could be higher with a large number of Thai
characters  and the presences of named entities and loanwords transliterated
from Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, English, etc.

In this shared task, you will be given a huge set of manually word-annotated
Thai texts (up to 7M words) distributed in various domains and genres. All
participants are encouraged to join the InterBEST 2009 workshop co-located
with the 8th International Symposium on Natural Language Processing (SNLP
2009) in Bangkok, Thailand, this coming October 2009.

Please note that the deadline of abstract submission is extended to 15 July
2009.
For more information, please visit the InterBEST 2009 website at
http://www.hlt.nectec.or.th/best

Your participation is BEST appreciated,
InterBEST 2009
Organizing Committee