CLEF 2014 : information access evaluation meets multilinguality, multimodality, and interaction

Cappellato, Linda and Clough, Paul and Ferro, Nicola and Hall, Mark and Halvey, Martin and Hanbury, Allan and Kanoulas, Evangelos and Kraaij, Wessel and Lupu, Mihai and Sanderson, Mark and Toms, Elaine and Villa, Robert (2014) CLEF 2014 : information access evaluation meets multilinguality, multimodality, and interaction. ACM SIGIR Forum, 48 (2). pp. 56-62. ISSN 1558-0229 (https://doi.org/10.1145/2701583.2701589)

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Abstract

The 2014 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) event was held at the University of Sheffield, UK, on September 15–18, 2014. The conference was entitled “Information Access Evaluation meets Multilinguality, Multimodality and Interaction” and addressed issues around multilingual and multimodal information access, information interaction, as well as the evaluation of search systems. CLEF celebrated its 15th anniversary this year having been conceived in 2000 as the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum aimed at stimulating research and innovation in multimodal and multilingual information access and retrieval. Over the years, it has actively nurtured and engaged a vibrant, multidisciplinary research community in the study, design, and implementation of evaluation methods for multiple tasks using diverse data sets and in many languages. In the first 10 years, CLEF conducted a series of experimental labs that were reported annually at workshops held in conjunction with the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL). In 2010, now a mature and well-respected evaluation forum, it expanded to include a complementary peer-reviewed conference for reporting the evaluation of information access and retrieval systems regardless of data type, format, language, etc. Since then CLEF has continued that format with keynotes, contributed papers, lab sessions, and poster sessions, including reports from other benchmarking initiatives from around the world. The CLEF 2014 conference had more than 150 participants from different academic institutions and industrial organisations. Though the majority (114) of participants come from Europe, there was also considerable interest in CLEF worldwide, with 20 participants from the Americas, 16 from Asia, 1 from Australia, and 2 from the Middle East.