Comparative Evaluation Of Multilingual Information Access Systems

The fourth campaign of the Cross-language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for European languages was held from January to August 2003. Participation in this campaign showed a slight rise in the number of participants from the previous year, with 42 groups submitting results for one or more of the different tracks (compared with 37 in 2002), but a steep rise in the number of experiments attempted. A distinctive feature of CLEF 2003 was the number of new tracks and tasks that were offered as pilot experiments. The aim was to try out new ideas and to encourage the development of new evaluation methodologies, suited to the emerging requirements of both system developers and users with respect to today’s digital collections and to encourage work on many European languages rather than just those most widely used. CLEF is thus gradually pushing its participants towards the ultimate goal: the development of truly multilingual systems capable of processing collections in diverse media. The campaign culminated in a two-day workshop held in Trondheim, Norway, 21–22 August, immediately following the 7th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2003), and attended by more than 70 researchers and system developers. The objective of the workshop was to bring together the groups that had participated in the CLEF 2003 campaign so that they could report on the results of their experiments.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 4th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2003, held in Trondheim, Norway in August 2003. The 61 revised papers presented together with an introduction were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on mainly cross-language experiments, mono lingual experiments, domain-specific document retrieval, interactive cross-language retrieval, cross-language question answering, cross-language image retrieval, and cross-language spoken document retrieval.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 5th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2004, held in Bath, UK in September 2004. The 80 revised papers presented together with an introduction were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on ad hoc text retrieval tracks (mainly cross-language experiments and monolingual experiments), domain-specific document retrieval, interactive cross-language information retrieval, multiple language question answering, cross-language retrieval in image collections, cross-language spoken document retrieval, and on issues in CLIR and in evaluation.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 6th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2005. The book presents 111 revised papers together with an introduction. Topical sections include multilingual textual document retrieval, cross-language and more, monolingual experiments, domain-specific information retrieval, interactive cross-language information retrieval, multiple language question answering, cross-language retrieval in image collections, cross-language speech retrieval, multilingual Web track, cross-language geographical retrieval, and evaluation issues.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference of the CLEF Initiative, CLEF 2013, held in Valencia, Spain, in September 2013. The 32 papers and 2 keynotes presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. The papers are organized in topical sections named: evaluation and visualization; multilinguality and less-resourced languages; applications; and Lab overviews.

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.