The future of evaluation for cross-language information retrieval systems

The objective of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) is to promote research in the multilingual information access domain. In this short paper, we list the achievements of CLEF during its first four years of activity and describe how the range of tasks has been considerably expanded during this period. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the importance of evaluation initiatives with respect to system research and development and to show how essential it is for such initiatives to keep abreast of and even anticipate the emerging needs of both system developers and application communities if they are to have a future.