Nicola Ferro Livres

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the CLEF Initiative, CLEF 2018, jointly organized by Avignon, Marseille and Toulon universities and held in Avignon, France, in September 2018. The conference has a clear focus on experimental information retrieval with special attention to the challenges of multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search ranging from unstructured to semi structures and structured data. The 13 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. Many papers tackle the medical ehealth and ehealth multimedia retrieval challenges, however there are many other topics of research such as document clustering, social biases in IR, social book search, personality profiling. Further this volume presents 9 “best of the labs” papers which were reviewed as a full paper submission with the same review criteria. The labs represented scientific challenges based on new data sets and real world problems in multimodal and multilingual information access. In addition to this, 10 benchmarking labs reported results of their yearlong activities in overview talks and lab sessions. The papers address all aspects of information access in any modularity and language and cover a broad range of topics in the field of multilingual and multimodal information access evaluation.

The research domains of information retrieval and databases have historically taken different approaches to information management. Recently, however, there has been significant cross-fertilization between the two fields, leading to shared research challenges. In February 2013, a winter school was held in Bressanone, Italy, as part of the EU-funded PROMISE project (Participative Research Laboratory for Multimedia and Multilingual Information Systems Evaluation). PROMISE aimed to enhance the experimental evaluation of complex multimedia and multilingual information systems to assist individuals, businesses, and communities in designing, developing, and improving these systems. The project sought to create a unified environment for collecting data, knowledge, tools, and methodologies to support the user community in experimental evaluation. This book is the result of the PROMISE Winter School 2013, featuring 9 invited lectures from the fields of information retrieval and databases, along with short papers from the best student poster awards. It covers a wide range of topics, including databases, information retrieval, experimental evaluation, metrics and statistics, semantic search, keyword search in databases, semi-structured search, and the evaluation of both information retrieval and databases, as well as crowdsourcing and social media.