Preface to Evaluating Systems for Multilingual and Multimodal information Access

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 9th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2008, held in Aarhus, Denmark, in September 2008. The 130 revised and extended papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. They are completed by an introduction on CLEF 2008. As usual, the seven main evaluation tracks in CLEF 2008 aimed to test the performance of a wide range of multilingual information access systems or system components. The papers are organized in topical main sections on Multilingual Textual Document Retrieval (Ad Hoc), Mono- and Cross-Language Scientific Data Retrieval (Domain-Specific), Interactive Cross-Language Retrieval (iCLEF), Multiple Language Question Answering (QA@CLEF), Cross-Language Retrieval in Image Collections (ImageCLEF), Multilingual Web Track (WebCLEF), Cross-Language Geographical Retrieval (GeoCLEF), Cross-Language Video Retrieval (VideoCLEF), Multilingual Information Filtering (INFILE@CLEF), and Morpho Challenge at CLEF 2008.