CLEF 2005: Ad Hoc track overview

We describe the objectives and organization of the CLEF 2005 ad hoc track and discuss the main characteristics of the tasks offered to test monolingual, bilingual and multilingual textual document retrieval. The performance achieved for each task is presented and a preliminary analysis of results is given. The paper focuses in particular on the multilingual tasks which reused the test collection created in CLEF 2003 in an attempt to see if an improvement in system performance over time could be measured, and also to examine the multilingual results merging problem

An evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval

In this paper we present an evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval developed within the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The GeoCLEF track is dedicated to the evaluation of geographic information retrieval systems. The resource encompasses more than 600,000 documents, 75 topics so far, and more than 100,000 relevance judgments for these topics. Geographic information retrieval requires an evaluation resource which represents realistic information needs and which is geographically challenging. Some experimental results and analysis are reported

DCU@TRECMed 2012: Using ad-hoc baselines for domain-specific retrieval

This paper describes the first participation of DCU in the TREC Medical Records Track (TRECMed). We performed some initial experiments on the 2011 TRECMed data based on the BM25 retrieval model. Surprisingly, we found that the standard BM25 model with default parameters, performs comparable to the best automatic runs submitted to TRECMed 2011 and would have resulted in rank four out of 29 participating groups. We expected that some form of domain adaptation would increase performance. However, results on the 2011 data proved otherwise: concept-based query expansion decreased performance, and filtering and reranking by term proximity also decreased performance slightly. We submitted four runs based on the BM25 retrieval model to TRECMed 2012 using standard BM25, standard query expansion, result filtering, and concept-based query expansion. Official results for 2012 confirm that domain-specific knowledge does not increase performance compared to the BM25 baseline as applied by us

GeoCLEF 2007: the CLEF 2007 cross-language geographic information retrieval track overview

GeoCLEF ran as a regular track for the second time within the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2007. The purpose of GeoCLEF is to test and evaluate cross-language geographic information retrieval (GIR): retrieval for topics with a geographic specification. GeoCLEF 2007 consisted of two sub tasks. A search task ran for the third time and a query classification task was organized for the first. For the GeoCLEF 2007 search task, twenty-five search topics were defined by the organizing groups for searching English, German, Portuguese and Spanish document collections. All topics were translated into English, Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish and German. Several topics in 2007 were geographically challenging. Thirteen groups submitted 108 runs. The groups used a variety of approaches. For the classification task, a query log from a search engine was provided and the groups needed to identify the queries with a geographic scope and the geographic components within the local queries

Overview of the 2005 cross-language image retrieval track (ImageCLEF)

The purpose of this paper is to outline efforts from the 2005 CLEF crosslanguage image retrieval campaign (ImageCLEF). The aim of this CLEF track is to explore the use of both text and content-based retrieval methods for cross-language image retrieval. Four tasks were offered in the ImageCLEF track: a ad-hoc retrieval from an historic photographic collection, ad-hoc retrieval from a medical collection, an automatic image annotation task, and a user-centered (interactive) evaluation task that is explained in the iCLEF summary. 24 research groups from a variety of backgrounds and nationalities (14 countries) participated in ImageCLEF. In this paper we describe the ImageCLEF tasks, submissions from participating groups and summarise the main fndings

Challenges to evaluation of multilingual geographic information retrieval in GeoCLEF

This is the third year of the evaluation of geographic information retrieval (GeoCLEF) within the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). GeoCLEF 2006 presented topics and documents in four languages (English, German, Portuguese and Spanish). After two years of evaluation we are beginning to understand the challenges to both Geographic Information Retrieval from text and of evaluation of the results of geographic information retrieval. This poster enumerates some of these challenges to evaluation and comments on the limitations encountered in the first two evaluations

Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks: Resurrecting Multilingual Retrieval Using Zero-shot Learning

While billions of non-English speaking users rely on search engines every day, the problem of ad-hoc information retrieval is rarely studied for non-English languages. This is primarily due to a lack of data set that are suitable to train ranking algorithms. In this paper, we tackle the lack of data by leveraging pre-trained multilingual language models to transfer a retrieval system trained on English collections to non-English queries and documents. Our model is evaluated in a zero-shot setting, meaning that we use them to predict relevance scores for query-document pairs in languages never seen during training. Our results show that the proposed approach can significantly outperform unsupervised retrieval techniques for Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, and Spanish. We also show that augmenting the English training collection with some examples from the target language can sometimes improve performance.Comment: ECIR 2020 (short

Report of MIRACLE team for the Ad-Hoc track in CLEF 2007

This paper presents the 2007 MIRACLE’s team approach to the AdHoc Information Retrieval track. The work carried out for this campaign has been reduced to monolingual experiments, in the standard and in the robust tracks. No new approaches have been attempted in this campaign, following the procedures established in our participation in previous campaigns. For this campaign, runs were submitted for the following languages and tracks: - Monolingual: Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Czech. - Robust monolingual: French, English and Portuguese. There is still some room for improvement around multilingual named entities recognition

The Eurovision St Andrews collection of photographs

This report describes the Eurovision image collection compiled for the ImageCLEF (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) evaluation exercise. The image collection consists of around 30,000 photographs from the collection provided by the University of St Andrews Library. The construction and composition of this unique image collection are described, together with the necessary information to obtain and use the image collection