From CLEF to TrebleCLEF: promoting technology transfer for multilingual information retrieval

The Cross Language Evaluation Forum has been an activity of DELOS for the last eight years. During this period, it has promoted research in the domain of multilingual information retrieval. This activity has produced considerable results; in particular it has encouraged experimentation with all kinds of multilingual information access - from the development of systems for monolingual text retrieval operating on multiple languages to the implementation of full multilingual multimedia search functionality. However, despite the research advances, there are still very few operational systems in existence, and these are limited to the most widely used languages. The challenge that must now be faced is how to best transfer the research results to the wider market place. The paper provides a critical assessment of the main results achieved by CLEF so far and discusses plans now underway to extend its activities in order to have a more direct impact on the application sector with the introduction of a new activity: TrebleCLEF.