=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-1172/CLEF2006wn-all-Peters2006 |storemode=property |title=What Happened in CLEF 2006: Introduction to the Working Notes |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1172/CLEF2006wn-all-Peters2006.pdf |volume=Vol-1172 |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/clef/Peters06a }} ==What Happened in CLEF 2006: Introduction to the Working Notes== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1172/CLEF2006wn-all-Peters2006.pdf
                                    What happened in CLEF 2006
                                 Introduction to the Working Notes

                                                   Carol Peters
                    Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione (ISTI-CNR), Pisa, Italy
                                              carol.peters@isti.cnr.it

The objective of CLEF is to promote research in the field of multilingual system development. This is done
through the organisation of annual evaluation campaigns in which a series of tracks designed to test different
aspects of mono- and cross-language information retrieval (IR) are offered. The intention is to encourage
experimentation with all kinds of multilingual information access – from the development of systems for
monolingual retrieval operating on many languages to the implementation of complete multilingual multimedia
search services. This has been achieved by offering an increasingly complex and varied set of evaluation tasks over
the years. The aim is not only to meet but also to anticipate the emerging needs of the R&D community and to
encourage the development of next generation multilingual IR systems.
These Working Notes contain descriptions of the experiments conducted within CLEF 2006 – the sixth in a series
of annual system evaluation campaigns 1 . The results of the experiments will be presented and discussed in the
CLEF 2006 Workshop, 20-22 September, Alicante, Spain. The final papers - revised and extended as a result of the
discussions at the Workshop - together with a comparative analysis of the results will appear in the CLEF 2006
Proceedings, to be published by Springer in their Lecture Notes for Computer Science series.
As from CLEF 2005, the Working Notes are published in electronic format only and are distributed to participants
at the Workshop on CD-ROM together with the Book of Abstracts in printed form. All reports included in the
Working Notes will also be inserted in the DELOS Digital Library, accessible at http://delos-dl.isti.cnr.it.
Both Working Notes and Book of Abstracts are divided into eight sections, corresponding to the CLEF 2006
evaluation tracks. In addition appendices are included containing run statistics for the Ad Hoc, Domain-Specific,
GeoCLEF and QA tracks, plus a list of all participating groups showing in which track they took part.
The main features of the 2006 campaign are briefly outlined here below in order to provide the necessary
background to the experiments reported in the rest of the Working Notes.

1.   Tracks and Tasks in CLEF 2006
CLEF 2006 offered eight tracks designed to evaluate the performance of systems for:
• mono-, bi- and multilingual textual document retrieval on news collections (Ad Hoc)
• mono- and cross-language information on structured scientific data (Domain-Specific)
• interactive cross-language retrieval (iCLEF)
• multiple language question answering (QA@CLEF)
• cross-language retrieval in image collections (ImageCLEF)
• cross-language spoken document retrieval (CL-SR)
• multilingual retrieval of Web documents (WebCLEF)
• cross-language geographical retrieval (GeoCLEF)
Although these tracks are the same as those offered in CLEF 2005, many of the tasks offered are new.
Multilingual Text Retrieval (Ad Hoc): Similarly to last year, the 2006 track offered mono- and bilingual tasks on
target collections in French, Portuguese, Bulgarian and Hungarian. The topics (i.e. statements of information needs
from which queries are derived) were prepared in a wide range of European languages (Bulgarian, English,
French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish). We also offered a bilingual task aimed at encouraging
system testing with non-European languages against an English target collection. Topics were supplied in:
Amharic, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Oromo and Telugu. This choice of languages was determined by the
demand from participants. In addition, a new “robust” task was offered; this task emphasized the importance of
stable performance over languages instead of high average performance in mono-, bilingual and multilingual IR. It
made use of test collections previously developed at CLEF. The track is coordinated jointly by ISTI-CNR and
U.Padua (Italy) and U.Hildesheim (Germany).


1
 CLEF is included in the activities of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, funded by the Sixth Framework
Programme of the European Commission. For information on DELOS, see www.delos.info.
Cross-Language Scientific Data Retrieval (Domain-Specific): This track studied retrieval in a domain-specific
context using the GIRT-4 German/English social science database and two Russian corpora: Russian Social
Science Corpus (RSSC) and the ISISS collection of sociology and economics documents. Multilingual controlled
vocabularies (German-English, English-German, German-Russian, English-Russian) were available. Monolingual
and cross-language tasks were offered. Topics were prepared in English, German and Russian. Participants could
make use of the indexing terms inside the documents and/or the Social Science Thesaurus provided, not only as
translation means, but also for tuning relevance decisions of their system. The track is coordinated by IZ Bonn
(Germany).
Interactive CLIR (iCLEF): For CLEF 2006, the interactive track joined forces with the image track to work on a
new type of interactive image retrieval task to better capture the interplay between image and the multilingual
reality of the internet for the public at large. The task was based on the popular image perusal community Flickr
(www.flickr.com), a dynamic and rapidly changing database of images with textual comments, captions, and titles
in many languages and annotated by image creators and viewers cooperatively in a self-organizing ontology of
tags (a so-called “folksonomy”). The track is coordinated by UNED (Spain), U. Sheffield (UK) and SICS
(Sweden).
Multilingual Question Answering (QA@CLEF): This track, which has received increasing interest at CLEF
since 2003, evaluated both monolingual (non-English) and cross-language QA systems. The main task evaluated
open domain QA systems. Target collections were offered in Bulgarian, Dutch, English (bilingual only), French,
German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish. In addition, three pilot tasks were organized: a task that assessed question
answering using Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia; an Answer Validation exercise; and a “Time-constrained”
exercise to be conducted during the workshop. A number of institutions (one for each language) collaborated in the
organization of the main task; the Wikipedia activity was coordinated by U. Amsterdam (The Netherlands), the
Answer Validation exercise by UNED (Spain) and the Time-constrained exercise by U. Alicante (Spain). The
overall coordination of this track is by ITC-irst and CELCT, Trento (Italy).
Cross-Language Retrieval in Image Collections (ImageCLEF):
This track evaluated retrieval of images described by text captions based on queries in a different language; both
text and image matching techniques were potentially exploitable. Two main sub-tracks were organised for
photographic and medical image retrieval. Each track offered two tasks: bilingual ad hoc retrieval (collection in
English, queries in a range of languages) and an annotation task in the first case; medical image retrieval
(collection with casenotes in English, French and German, queries derived from short text plus image - visual,
mixed and semantic queries) and automatic annotation for medical images (fully categorized collection, categories
available in English and German) in the second. The tasks offered different and challenging retrieval problems for
cross-language image retrieval. Image analysis was not required for all tasks and a default visual image retrieval
system was made available for participants as well as results from a basic text retrieval system. The track
coordinators are University of Sheffield (UK) and the University and Hospitals of Geneva (Switzerland). Oregon
Health and Science University (USA), Victoria University, Melbourne (Australia), RWTH Aachen University
(Germany), and Vienna University of Technology (Austria) collaborate in the task organization.
Cross-Language Speech Retrieval (CL-SR): In 2005, the CL-SR track built a reusable test collection for
searching spontaneous conversational English speech using queries in five languages (Czech, English, French,
German and Spanish), speech recognition for spoken words, manually and automatically assigned controlled
vocabulary descriptors for concepts, dates and locations, manually assigned person names, and hand-written
segment summaries. The 2006 CL-SR track included a second test collection containing about 500 hours of Czech
speech. Multilingual topic sets were again created for five languages. The track was coordinated by the
University of Maryland (USA) and Dublin City University (Ireland).
Multilingual Web Retrieval (WebCLEF): WebCLEF 2006 used the EuroGOV collection, with web
pages crawled from European governmental sites for over 20 languages/countries. It was decided to focus this year
on the mixed-monolingual known-item topics. The topics were a mixture of old topics and new topics. The old
topics were a subset of last year's topics; the new topics were provided by the organizers, using a new method for
generating known-item test beds and some human generated new topics. The experiments explored two
complementary dimensions: old vs new topics; topics generated by participants vs automatically topics generated
by the organizers
Cross-Language Geographical Retrieval (GeoCLEF): The track provided a framework in which to evaluate
GIR systems for search tasks involving both spatial and multilingual aspects. Participants were offered a TREC
style ad hoc retrieval task based on existing CLEF collections. The aim was to compare methods of query
translation, query expansion, translation of geographical references, use of text and spatial retrieval methods
separately or combined, retrieval models and indexing methods. Given a multilingual statement describing a
spatial user need (topic), the challenge was to find relevant documents from target collections in English and
Portuguese German and/or Spanish news documents. Monolingual and cross-language tasks were activated. 25
topics were prepared in the target languages and in Japanese. Spatial analysis was not required to participate in this
task but could be used to augment text-retrieval methods. A number of groups collaborated in the organization of
the track; the overall coordination was by UC Berkley (USA) and U. Sheffield (UK).

2.   Test Collections
The CLEF test collections, created as a result of the evaluation campaigns, consist of topics or queries, documents,
and relevance assessments. Each track was responsible for preparing its own topic/query statements and for
performing relevance assessments of the results submitted by participating groups. A number of different
document collections were used in CLEF 2006 to build the test collections:
    • CLEF multilingual comparable corpus of more than 2 million news docs in 12 languages (see Table 1) ;
        this corpus was unchanged from 2005. Parts of this collection were used in three tracks: Ad-Hoc (all
        languages except Finnish, Swedish and Russian), Question Answering (all languages except Finnish,
        Hungarian, Swedish and Russian) and GeoCLEF (English, German, Portuguese and Spanish).
    • The CLEF domain-specific collection consisting of the GIRT-4 social science database in English and
        German (over 300,000 documents) and two Russian databases: the Russian Social Science Corpus
        (approx. 95,000 documents) and the Russian ISISS collection for sociology and economics (approx.
        150,000 docs). The ISISS corpus was new this year. Controlled vocabularies in German-English and
        German-Russian were also made available to the participants in this track. This collection was used in the
        domain-specific track.
    • The ImageCLEF track used four collections:
              - the ImageCLEFmed radiological medical database based on a dataset containing images from
                 the Casimage, MIR, PEIR, and PathoPIC datasets (about 50,000 images) with case notes in
                 English (majority) but also German and French.
              - the IRMA collection in English and German of 10,000 images for automatic medical image
                 annotation
              - the IAPR TC-12 database of 25,000 photographs with captions in English, German and Spanish
              - a general photographic collection for image annotation provide by LookThatUp (LTUtech)
                 database
    • The Speech retrieval track used the Malach collection of spontaneous conversational speech derived from
        the Shoah archives in English (more than 750 hours) and Czech (approx 500 hours)
    • The WebCLEF track used a collection crawled from European governmental sites, called EuroGOV. This
        collection consists of more than 3.35 million pages from 27 primary domains. The most frequent
        languages are Finnish (20%), German (18%), Hungarian (13%), English (10%), and Latvian (9%).

3. Technical Infrastructure
The CLEF technical infrastructure is managed by the DIRECT system. DIRECT manages the test data
plus results submission and analyses for the ad hoc, question answering and geographic IR tracks. It has
been designed to facilitate data management tasks but also to support the production, maintenance,
enrichment and interpretation of the scientific data for subsequent in-depth evaluation studies.
The technical infrastructure is thus responsible for:
• the track set-up, harvesting of documents, management of the registration of participants to tracks;
• the submission of experiments, collection of metadata about experiments, and their validation;
• the creation of document pools and the management of relevance assessment;
• the provision of common statistical analysis tools for both organizers and participants in order to allow the
    comparison of the experiments;
• the provision of common tools for summarizing, producing reports and graphs on the measured performances
    and conducted analyses.
DIRECT was designed and implemented by Giorgio Di Nunzio and Nicola Ferro and is described in more detail in
a paper in these Working Notes.
               Table 1: Sources and dimensions of the CLEF 2006 multilingual comparable corpus




               Collection               Added in       Size      No. of Docs      Median Size      Median Size      Median Size
                                                      (MB)                         of Docs.          of Docs.         of Docs
                                                                                   (Bytes)          (Tokens) 2       (Features)
    Bulgarian: Sega 2002                  2005         120         33,356             NA                NA              NA
    Bulgarian: Standart 2002              2005         93          35,839             NA                NA              NA
    Dutch: Algemeen Dagblad 94/95         2001         241         106483            1282              166              112
    Dutch: NRC Handelsblad 94/95          2001         299         84121             2153              354              203
    English: LA Times 94                  2000         425         113005            2204              421              246
    English: Glasgow Herald 95            2003         154         56472             2219              343              202
    Finnish: Aamulehti late 94/95         2002         137         55344             1712              217              150
    French: Le Monde 94                   2000         158         44013             1994              361              213
    French: ATS 94                        2001          86         43178             1683              227              137
    French: ATS 95                        2003          88         42615             1715              234              140
    German: Frankfurter Rundschau94       2000         320         139715            1598              225              161
    German: Der Spiegel 94/95             2000          63          13979            1324              213              160
    German: SDA 94                        2001         144         71677             1672              186              131
    German: SDA 95                        2003         144         69438             1693              188              132
    Hungarian: Magyar Hirlap 2002         2005         105         49,530             NA                NA              NA
    Italian: La Stampa 94                 2000         193          58051            1915              435              268
    Italian: AGZ 94                       2001          86         50527             1454              187              129
    Italian: AGZ 95                       2003          85         48980             1474              192              132
    Portuguese: Público 1994              2004         164         51751              NA                NA              NA
    Portuguese: Público 1995              2004         176         55070              NA                NA              NA
    Portuguese: Folha 94                  2005         108         51,875             NA                NA              NA
    Portuguese: Folha 95                  2005         116         52,038             NA                NA              NA
    Russian: Izvestia 95                  2003          68          16761             NA                NA              NA
    Spanish: EFE 94                       2001         511         215738            2172              290              171
    Spanish: EFE 95                       2003         577         238307            2221              299              175
    Swedish: TT 94/95                     2002         352         142819            2171              183              121

                            SDA/ATS/AGZ = Schweizerische Depeschenagentur (Swiss News Agency)
                                     EFE = Agencia EFE S.A (Spanish News Agency)
                                   TT = Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (Swedish newspaper)




2
 The number of tokens extracted from each document can vary slightly across systems, depending on the respective definition
of what constitutes a token. Consequently, the number of tokens and features given in this table are approximations and may
differ from actual implemented systems.
                                                          CLEF 2000-2006 Participation

                                      100.0
                                       90.0
                                       80.0
                                       70.0                                                          Oceania
                                       60.0                                                          South America
                                       50.0                                                          North America
                                       40.0                                                          Asia
                                       30.0                                                          Europe
                                       20.0
                                       10.0
                                        0.0
                                          2000     2001    2002   2003     2004     2005     2006



                                                 Figure 1. CLEF 2000 – 2006: Increase in Participation




                                                          CLEF 2000-2006 Tracks
                                 40                                                                            AdHoc
                                 35
                                                                                                               DomSpec
          Participating Groups




                                 30

                                                                                                               iCLEF
                                 25


                                 20                                                                            CL-SR
                                 15
                                                                                                               QA@CLEF
                                 10


                                 5
                                                                                                               ImageCLEF

                                 0                                                                             WebClef
                                      2000       2001     2002     2003      2004          2005     2006
                                                                                                               GeoClef
                                                                   Years


                                                   Figure 2. CLEF 2000 – 2006: Shift in Participation

4.      Participation
A total of 90 groups submitted runs in CLEF 2006, as opposed to the 74 groups of CLEF 2005: 59.5(43) from
Europe, 14.5(19) from N.America; 10(10) from Asia, 4(1) from S.America and 2(1) from Australia 3 . Last years'
figures are given between brackets. The breakdown of participation of groups per track is as follows: Ad Hoc 25;
Domain-Specific 4; iCLEF 3; QAatCLEF 37; ImageCLEF 25; CL-SR 6; WebCLEF 8; GeoCLEF 17. As in
previous years, participating groups consisted of a nice mix of new-comers (34) and groups that had participated in
one or more previous editions (56). Most of the groups came from academia; there were just 9 research groups
from industry. A list of groups and indications of the tracks in which they participated is given in Appendix to
these Working Notes.
Figure 1 shows the growth in participation this year and Figure 2 shows the shift in focus over the years as new
tracks have been added.



3
    The 0.5 figures result from a Mexican/Spanish collaboration.
5.   Workshop
CLEF aims at creating a strong CLIR/MLIR research and development community. The Workshop 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 work of the groups participating in this year’s
campaign will be presented in plenary and parallel paper sessions and an afternoon poster session. There will also
be break-out sessions for more in-depth discussion of the results of individual tracks and intentions for the future.
The final sessions will include discussions on ideas for new tracks in future campaigns. Overall, the Workshop
should provide an ample panorama of the current state-of-the-art and the latest research directions in the
multilingual information retrieval area. I very much hope that it will prove an interesting, worthwhile and
enjoyable experience to all those who participate.
      The final programme and the presentations at the Workshop will be posted on the CLEF website at
http://www.clef-campaign.org.

Acknowledgements
I could not run the CLEF evaluation initiative and organize the annual workshops without considerable assistance
from many people. CLEF is organized on a distributed basis, with different research groups being responsible for
the running of the various tracks. My gratitude goes to all those who have been involved in the coordination of the
2006 campaign. A list of the principal institutions involved is given on the following page. However, it is really
impossible for me to list here the names of all the people involved in the organization of the different tracks. Here
below, let me just mention those responsible for the overall coordination:
     • Giorgio Di Nunzio, Nicola Ferro and Thomas Mandl for the Ad Hoc Track
     • Maximilian Stempfhuber, Stefan Baerisch and Natalia Loukachevitch for the Domain-Specific track
     • Julio Gonzalo, Paul Clough and Jussi Karlgren for iCLEF
     • Bernardo Magnini, Danilo Giampiccolo, Fernado Llopis, Elisa Noguera, Anselmo Peñas and Maarten de
          Rijke for QA@CLEF
     • Paul Clough, Thomas Deselaers, Michael Grubinger, Allan Hanbury, William Hersh, Thomas Lehmann
          and Henning Müller for ImageCLEF
     • Douglas W. Oard and Gareth J. F. Jones for CL-SR
     • Krisztian Balog, Leif Azzopardi, Jaap Kamps and Maarten de Rijke for Web-CLEF
     • Fredric Gey, Ray Larson and Mark Sanderson as the main coordinators of GeoCLEF
I apologise for those I have not mentioned here. However, I really must express my appreciation to Diana Santos
and her colleagues at Linguateca in Norway and Portugal, for all their efforts aimed at supporting the inclusion of
Portuguese in CLEF activities. I also thank all those colleagues who have helped us by preparing topic sets in
different languages and in particular the NLP Lab. Dept. of Computer Science and Information Engineering of the
National Taiwan University for their work on Chinese.
I should also like to thank the members of the CLEF Steering Committee who have assisted me with their advice
and suggestions throughout this campaign.
     Furthermore, I gratefully acknowledge the support of all the data providers and copyright holders, and in
particular:
     ƒ The Los Angeles Times, for the American-English data collection
     ƒ SMG Newspapers (The Herald) for the British-English data collection
     ƒ Le Monde S.A. and ELDA: Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency, for the French data
     ƒ Frankfurter Rundschau, Druck und Verlagshaus Frankfurt am Main; Der Spiegel, Spiegel Verlag,
         Hamburg, for the German newspaper collections
     ƒ InformationsZentrum Sozialwissen-schaften, Bonn, for the GIRT database
     ƒ SocioNet system for the Russian Social Science Corpora
     ƒ Hypersystems Srl, Torino and La Stampa, for the Italian data
     ƒ Agencia EFE S.A. for the Spanish data
     ƒ NRC Handelsblad, Algemeen Dagblad and PCM Landelijke dagbladen/Het Parool for the Dutch
         newspaper data
     ƒ Aamulehti Oyj and Sanoma Osakeyhtiö for the Finnish newspaper data
     ƒ Russika-Izvestia for the Russian newspaper data
     ƒ Público, Portugal, and Linguateca for the Portuguese (PT) newspaper collection
     ƒ Folha, Brazil, and Linguateca for the Portuguese (BR) newspaper collection
     ƒ Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (TT) SE-105 12 Stockholm, Sweden for the Swedish newspaper data
    ƒ Schweizerische Depeschenagentur, Switzerland, for the French, German and Italian Swiss news agency
        data
    ƒ Ringier Kiadoi Rt. [Ringier Publishing Inc.].and the Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Acad.
        Sci. for the Hungarian newspaper documents
    ƒ Sega AD, Sofia; Standart Nyuz AD, Sofia, and the BulTreeBank Project, Linguistic Modelling
        Laboratory, IPP, Bulgarian Acad. Sci, for the Bulgarian newspaper documents
    ƒ St Andrews University Library for the historic photographic archive
    ƒ University and University Hospitals, Geneva, Switzerland and Oregon Health and Science University for
        the ImageCLEFmed Radiological Medical Database
    ƒ Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), Germany for the IRMA database of annotated medical
        images
    ƒ The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and IBM for the Malach spoken document
        collection
Without their contribution, this evaluation activity would be impossible.

Last and not least, I should like to express my gratitude to Alessandro Nardi in Pisa and José Luis Vicedo, Patricio
Martínez Barco and Maximiliano Saiz Noeda, U. Alicante, for their assistance in the organisation of the CLEF
2006 Workshop.
Coordination
CLEF is coordinated by the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche,
Pisa. The following institutions have contributed to the organisation of the different tracks of the CLEF 2006
campaign:
     • Centre for the Evaluation of Human Language and Multimodal Communication Technologies (CELCT),
        Trento, Italy
     • Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, Istituto Trentino di Cultura, Trento, Italy
     • College of Information Studies and Inst. for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland, USA
     • Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki
     • Department of Computer Science, University of Indonesia
     • Department of Computer Science Department, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
     • Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick, Ireland
     • Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National University of Taiwan
     • Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Italy
     • Department of Information Science, University of Hildesheim, Germany
     • Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, UK
     • Department of Medical Informatics, Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), Germany
     • Evaluations and Language Resources Distribution Agency Sarl, Paris, France
     • German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI, Saarbrücken,
     • Information and Language Processing Systems, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
     • InformationsZentrum Sozialwissenschaften, Bonn, Germany
     • Institute for Information technology, Hyderabad, India
     • Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain
     • Linguateca, Sintef, Oslo, Norway;
     • Linguistic Modelling Laboratory, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
     • National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg MD, USA
     • Biomedical Informatics, Oregon Health and Science University, USA
     • Research Computing Center of Moscow State University
     • Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
     • School of Computer Science and Mathematics, Victoria University, Australia
     • School of Computing, Dublin City University, Ireland
     • UC Data Archive and School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley, USA
     • University "Alexandru Ioan Cuza", IASI, Romania
     • University Hospitals and University of Geneva, Switzerland
CLEF Steering Committee
Maristella Agosti, University of Padova, Italy
Martin Braschler, Zurich University of Applied Sciences Winterhur, Switzerland
Amedeo Cappelli, ISTI-CNR & CELCT, Italy
Hsin-Hsi Chen, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
Khalid Choukri, Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency, Paris, France
Paul Clough, University of Sheffield, UK
Thomas Deselaers, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
David A. Evans, Clairvoyance Corporation, USA
Marcello Federico, ITC-irst, Trento, Italy
Christian Fluhr, CEA-LIST, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France
Norbert Fuhr, University of Duisburg, Germany
Frederic C. Gey, U.C. Berkeley, USA
Julio Gonzalo, LSI-UNED, Madrid, Spain
Donna Harman, National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA
Gareth Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland
Franciska de Jong, University of Twente, Netherlands
Noriko Kando, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan
Jussi Karlgren, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden
Michael Kluck, German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin, Germany
Natalia Loukachevitch, Moscow State University, Russia
Bernardo Magnini, ITC-irst, Trento, Italy
Paul McNamee, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Henning Müller, University & University Hospitals of Geneva, Switzerland
Douglas W. Oard, University of Maryland, USA
Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Jacques Savoy, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland
Diana Santos, Linguateca, Sintef, Oslo, Norway
Peter Schäuble, Eurospider Information Technologies, Switzerland
Richard Sutcliffe, University of Limerick, Ireland
Max Stempfhuber, Informationszentrum Sozialwissenschaften Bonn, Germany
Hans Uszkoreit, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany
Felisa Verdejo, LSI-UNED, Madrid, Spain
José Luis Vicedo, University of Alicante, Spain
Ellen Voorhees, National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA
Christa Womser-Hacker, University of Hildesheim, Germany