Treble-CLEF · Treble-CLEF: Evaluation, Best Practices and Collaboration for Multilingual Information Access

The popularity of Internet and the consequent global availability of networked information sources and digital libraries has led to a strong demand for multilingual access and communication technologies. Such technologies should support the timely and cost-effective provision of knowledge-intensive services for all members of linguistically and culturally diverse communities. This is particularly true in the multilingual setting of Europe. However, despite recent 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 objective of the Treble-CLEF proposal is to build on and extend the results already achieved by the existing Cross Language Evaluation Forum. The aim is not only to support the development and consolidation of expertise in the multidisciplinary research area of multilingual information access but also to disseminate this knowhow to the application communities. The specific target would be the European digital library context. Treble-CLEF would thus:<br/><br/>- support the annual CLEF system evaluation campaigns with tracks designed to meet the specific requirements of the user and application communities, and particular focus on user modeling, language-specific experimentation, and results presentation<br/><br/>- launch a concerted action of technology transfer and dissemination of knowhow, tools, resources and best practice guidelines through the organisation of workshops, tutorials and training sessions <br/><br/>- encourage community-building and collaboration around this topic by providing a forum for the discussion of results and making the scientific data, experiments and results produced during the course of an evaluation campaign publicly available.