Carol Peters - Böcker

This volume celebrates the twentieth anniversary of CLEF - the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum for the first ten years, and the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum since – and traces its evolution over these first two decades.

This volume celebrates the twentieth anniversary of CLEF - the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum for the first ten years, and the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum since – and traces its evolution over these first two decades.

This book presents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the international Cross-Language Evaluation Forum Workshop organized by the CLEF activity of the European DELOS Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries. The 25 revised papers presented together with an introduction were carefully selected based on two rounds of reviewing. All current aspects of cross-language information retrieval are addressed, ranging from foundational issues and systems evaluation to applications in a variety of fields.

The tenth campaign of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for European languages was held from January to September 2009. There were eight main eval- tion tracks in CLEF 2009 plus a pilot task. The aim, as usual, was to test the perfo- ance of a wide range of multilingual information access (MLIA) systems or system components. This year, about 150 groups, mainly but not only from academia, reg- tered to participate in the campaign. Most of the groups were from Europe but there was also a good contingent from North America and Asia. The results were presented at a two-and-a-half day workshop held in Corfu, Greece, September 30 to October 2, 2009, in conjunction with the European Conference on Digital Libraries. The workshop, attended by 160 researchers and system developers, provided the opportunity for all the groups that had participated in the evaluation campaign to get together, compare approaches and exchange ideas.

The tenth campaign of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for European languages was held from January to September 2009. There were eight main eval- tion tracks in CLEF 2009 plus a pilot task. The aim, as usual, was to test the perfo- ance of a wide range of multilingual information access (MLIA) systems or system components. This year, about 150 groups, mainly but not only from academia, reg- tered to participate in the campaign. Most of the groups were from Europe but there was also a good contingent from North America and Asia. The results were presented at a two-and-a-half day workshop held in Corfu, Greece, September 30 to October 2, 2009, in conjunction with the European Conference on Digital Libraries. The workshop, attended by 160 researchers and system developers, provided the opportunity for all the groups that had participated in the evaluation campaign to get together, compare approaches and exchange ideas.

In its ?rst ten years of activities (2000-2009), the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) played a leading role in stimulating investigation and research in a wide range of key areas in the information retrieval domain, such as cro- language question answering, image and geographic information retrieval, int- activeretrieval,and many more.It also promotedthe study andimplementation of appropriateevaluation methodologies for these diverse types of tasks and - dia. As a result, CLEF has been extremely successful in building a wide, strong, and multidisciplinary research community, which covers and spans the di?erent areasofexpertiseneededto dealwith thespreadofCLEFtracksandtasks.This constantly growing and almost completely voluntary community has dedicated an incredible amount of e?ort to making CLEF happen and is at the core of the CLEF achievements. CLEF 2010 represented a radical innovation of the “classic CLEF” format and an experiment aimed at understanding how “next generation” evaluation campaigns might be structured. We had to face the problem of how to innovate CLEFwhile still preservingits traditionalcorebusiness,namely the benchma- ing activities carried out in the various tracks and tasks. The consensus, after lively and community-wide discussions, was to make CLEF an independent four-day event, no longer organized in conjunction with the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL) where CLEF has been running as a two-and-a-half-day wo- shop. CLEF 2010 thus consisted of two main parts: a peer-reviewed conference – the ?rst two days – and a series of laboratories and workshops – the second two days.

We are living in a multilingual world and the diversity in languages which are used to interact with information access systems has generated a wide variety of challenges to be addressed by computer and information scientists. The growing amount of non-English information accessible globally and the increased worldwide exposure of enterprises also necessitates the adaptation of Information Retrieval (IR) methods to new, multilingual settings.Peters, Braschler and Clough present a comprehensive description of the technologies involved in designing and developing systems for Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR). They provide readers with broad coverage of the various issues involved in creating systems to make accessible digitally stored materials regardless of the language(s) they are written in. Details on Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) are also covered that help readers to understand how to develop retrieval systems that cross language boundaries. Their work is divided into six chapters and accompanies the reader step-by-step through the various stages involved in building, using and evaluating MLIR systems. The book concludes with some examples of recent applications that utilise MLIR technologies. Some of the techniques described have recently started to appear in commercial search systems, while others have the potential to be part of future incarnations.The book is intended for graduate students, scholars, and practitioners with a basic understanding of classical text retrieval methods. It offers guidelines and information on all aspects that need to be taken into consideration when building MLIR systems, while avoiding too many ‘hands-on details’ that could rapidly become obsolete. Thus it bridges the gap between the material covered by most of the classical IR textbooks and the novel requirements related to the acquisition and dissemination of information in whatever language it is stored.