This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access Evaluation, in continuation of the popular CLEF campaigns and workshops that have run for the last decade, CLEF 2011, held in Amsterdem, The Netherlands, in September 2011. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 2 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers accepted for the conference included research on evaluation methods and settings, natural language processing within different domains and languages, multimedia and reflections on CLEF. Two keynote speakers highlighted important developments in the field of evaluation: the role of users in evaluation and a framework for the use of crowdsourcing experiments in the setting of retrieval evaluation.

In its ?rst ten years of activities (2000-2009), the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) played a leading role in stimulating investigation and research in a wide range of key areas in the information retrieval domain, such as cro- language question answering, image and geographic information retrieval, int- activeretrieval,and many more.It also promotedthe study andimplementation of appropriateevaluation methodologies for these diverse types of tasks and - dia. As a result, CLEF has been extremely successful in building a wide, strong, and multidisciplinary research community, which covers and spans the di?erent areasofexpertiseneededto dealwith thespreadofCLEFtracksandtasks.This constantly growing and almost completely voluntary community has dedicated an incredible amount of e?ort to making CLEF happen and is at the core of the CLEF achievements. CLEF 2010 represented a radical innovation of the “classic CLEF” format and an experiment aimed at understanding how “next generation” evaluation campaigns might be structured. We had to face the problem of how to innovate CLEFwhile still preservingits traditionalcorebusiness,namely the benchma- ing activities carried out in the various tracks and tasks. The consensus, after lively and community-wide discussions, was to make CLEF an independent four-day event, no longer organized in conjunction with the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL) where CLEF has been running as a two-and-a-half-day wo- shop. CLEF 2010 thus consisted of two main parts: a peer-reviewed conference – the ?rst two days – and a series of laboratories and workshops – the second two days.

In its ?rst ten years of activities (2000-2009), the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) played a leading role in stimulating investigation and research in a wide range of key areas in the information retrieval domain, such as cro- language question answering, image and geographic information retrieval, int- activeretrieval,and many more.It also promotedthe study andimplementation of appropriateevaluation methodologies for these diverse types of tasks and - dia. As a result, CLEF has been extremely successful in building a wide, strong, and multidisciplinary research community, which covers and spans the di?erent areasofexpertiseneededto dealwith thespreadofCLEFtracksandtasks.This constantly growing and almost completely voluntary community has dedicated an incredible amount of e?ort to making CLEF happen and is at the core of the CLEF achievements. CLEF 2010 represented a radical innovation of the “classic CLEF” format and an experiment aimed at understanding how “next generation” evaluation campaigns might be structured. We had to face the problem of how to innovate CLEFwhile still preservingits traditionalcorebusiness,namely the benchma- ing activities carried out in the various tracks and tasks. The consensus, after lively and community-wide discussions, was to make CLEF an independent four-day event, no longer organized in conjunction with the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL) where CLEF has been running as a two-and-a-half-day wo- shop. CLEF 2010 thus consisted of two main parts: a peer-reviewed conference – the ?rst two days – and a series of laboratories and workshops – the second two days.

The ninth campaign of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for European languages was held from January to September 2008. There were seven main eval- tion tracks in CLEF 2008 plus two pilot tasks. The aim, as usual, was to test the p- formance of a wide range of multilingual information access (MLIA) systems or s- tem components. This year, 100 groups, mainly but not only from academia, parti- pated in the campaign. Most of the groups were from Europe but there was also a good contingent from North America and Asia plus a few participants from South America and Africa. Full details regarding the design of the tracks, the methodologies used for evaluation, and the results obtained by the participants can be found in the different sections of these proceedings. The results of the CLEF 2008 campaign were presented at a two-and-a-half day workshop held in Aarhus, Denmark, September 17–19, and attended by 150 resear- ers and system developers. The annual workshop, held in conjunction with the European Conference on Digital Libraries, plays an important role by providing the opportunity for all the groups that have participated in the evaluation campaign to get together comparing approaches and exchanging ideas. The schedule of the workshop was divided between plenary track overviews, and parallel, poster and breakout sessions presenting this year’s experiments and discu- ing ideas for the future. There were several invited talks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access Evaluation, in continuation of the popular CLEF campaigns and workshops that have run for the last decade, CLEF 2011, held in Amsterdem, The Netherlands, in September 2011. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 2 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers accepted for the conference included research on evaluation methods and settings, natural language processing within different domains and languages, multimedia and reflections on CLEF. Two keynote speakers highlighted important developments in the field of evaluation: the role of users in evaluation and a framework for the use of crowdsourcing experiments in the setting of retrieval evaluation.