The CLEF campaign

The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) provides an infrastructure aimed at supporting the development, testing and evaluation systems for cross-language information retrieval, and for monolingual information retrieval of European Languages other than English. Originally started as a track at the TREC-6 conference, CLEF became an independent initiative in 2000 when the coordination moved to Europe. The diversity of languages commonly spoken in Europe has led to a multilingual distributed setup that was chosen to best accommodate the unique linguistic properties of each language and the implications for topic development and relevance assessments. The task in CLEF 2000 involved a multilingual document collection in four core languages and several additional topic languages.