The CLEF 2003 Interactive Track

Abstract

The CLEF 2003 Interactive Track (iCLEF) was the third year of a shared experiment design to compare strategies for cross-language search assistance. Two kinds of experiments were performed: a) experiments in Cross-Language Document Selection, where the user task is to scan a ranked list of documents written in a foreign language, selecting those which seem relevant to a given query. The aim here is to compare different translation strategies for an “indicative” purpose; and b) Full Cross-Language Search experiments, where the user task is to maximize the number of relevant documents that can be found in a foreign-language collection with the help of an end-to-end cross-language search system. Participating teams could choose to focus on any aspects of the search task (e.g., query formulation, query translation and/or relevance feedback). This paper describes the shared experiment design and briefly summarizes the experiments run by the five teams that participated.