Multilingual test collection construction: the CLEF experience

Multilinguality is a key issue for European digital libraries although frequently neglected in practice. For this reason, the DELOS Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries decided to promote research into cross-language information retrieval and to support the activities of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum. CLEF provides an infrastructure for the evaluation of many kinds of multilingual information access functionality and aims at creating reusable test-suites that can be employed by system developers for benchmarking purposes. In this paper, we describe the methodology that has been followed in CLEF when creating various types of multilingual test collections.