Introduction: CLEF 2003 Working Notes

These Working Notes contain descriptions of the experiments conducted within CLEF 2003 ? the fourth in a series of annual system evaluation campaigns organised by the Cross-Language evaluation Forum1. The results of the experiments will be presented and discussed in the CLEF 2003 Workshop, 21-22 August, Trondheim, Norway. The final papers - revised and extended as a result of the discussions at the Workshop - together with a comparative analysis of the results will appear in the CLEF 2003 Proceedings, to be published by Springer in their Lecture Notes for Computer Science series. CLEF organises a series of evaluation tracks designed to test different aspects of mono- and cross-language information retrieval system development. The intention is to encourage systems to move from monolingual text retrieval to the implementation of a full multilingual multimedia search service. The main features of the 2003 campaign are briefly outlined here below in order to provide the necessary background to the experiments reported in this volume.