Introduction: Evaluation of Cross-Language Information Retrieval Systems

The objective of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) is to develop and maintain an infrastructure for the testing and evaluation of information retrieval systems operating on European languages, and to create test-suites of reusable data that can be employed by system developers for benchmarking purposes. The second CLEF evaluation campaign was held from January to September 2001 and ended with a workshop held in Darmstadt, Germany, 3-4 September, in which the participants in the campaign reported their experiments and discussed their results. These Proceedings consist of the revised, extended versions of the preliminary papers presented by the participants at the Workshop. In many cases, the participating groups not only describe and analyse their first results but report additional experiments made subsequent to the workshop. The volume consists of two parts and an appendix. The first part provides an exhaustive overview of the CLEF 2001 experiments whereas the second describes the framework against which these experiments were held. Readers who have never participated in CLEF or in similar evaluation campaigns may well prefer to begin with the second part in order to acquire the necessary background information on the organisation of this type of campaign, before entering into the details of the different cross-language and monolingual retrieval experiments. The appendix presents the results of all the participating groups for each track and task, run by run.