Multilingual Information Access for Text, Speech and Images ; 5th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2004, Bath, UK, September 15-17, 2004, Revised Selected Papers
The ?fth campaign of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for Eu- pean languages was held from January to September 2004. Participation in the CLEF campaigns has increased each year and CLEF 2004 was no exception: 55 groups submitted results for one or more of the di?erent tracks compared with 42 groups in the previous year. CLEF 2004 also marked a breaking point with respect to previous campaigns. The focus was no longer mainly concentrated on multilingual document retrieval as in previous years but was diversi?ed to include di?erent kinds of text retrieval across languages (e. g. , exact answers in the question-answering track) and retrieval on di?erent kinds of media (i. e. , not just plain text but collections containing image and speech as well). In ad- tion, increasing attention was given to issues that regard system usability and user satisfaction with tasks to measure the e?ectiveness of interactive systems or system components being included in both the cross-language question - swering and image retrieval tasks with the collaboration of the coordinators of the interactive track. The campaign culminated in a two-and-a-half-day workshop held in Bath, UK, 15–17 September, immediately following the 8th European Conference on Digital Libraries. The workshop was attended by nearly 100 researchers and s- tem developers.
Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks : NTCIR's Legacy of Research Impact
This open access book summarizes the first two decades of the NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also how it was done and the impact it has achieved. For example, in some chapters the reader sees the early seeds of what eventually grew to be the search engines that provide access to content on the World Wide Web, today’s smartphones that can tailor what they show to the needs of their owners, and the smart speakers that enrich our lives at home and on the move. We also get glimpses into how new search engines can be built for mathematical formulae, or for the digital record of a lived human life.
Accessing Multilingual Information Repositories ; 6th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2005, Vienna, Austria, 21-23 September, 2005, Revised Selected Papers
The sixth campaign of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for European languages was held from January to September 2005. CLEF is by now an established international evaluation initiative and 74 groups from all over the world submitted results for one or more of the different evaluation tracks in 2005, compared with 54 groups in 2004. There were eight distinct evaluation tracks, designed to test the performance of a wide range of systems for multilingual information access. Full details regarding the design of the tracks, the methodologies used for evaluation, and the results obtained by the participants can be found in the different sections of these proceedings.


