The CLEF 2017 conference is the eighteenth edition of the popular CLEF campaign and workshop series which has run since 2000 contributing to the systematic evaluation of multilingual and multimodal information access systems, primarily through experimentation on shared tasks. In 2010 CLEF was launched in a new format, as a conference with research presentations, panels, poster and demo sessions and laboratory evaluation workshops. These are proposed and operated by groups of organizers volunteering their time and e ort to de ne, promote, administrate and run an evaluation activity.
of the state-of-the-art in several research directions at the frontier of multimedia information retrieval, machine learning and knowledge engineering.
Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship and Social Software Misuse (PAN)6 provides evaluation of uncovering plagiarism, authorship, and social software misuse. PAN o ers three tasks at CLEF 2017 with new evaluation resources consisting of large-scale corpora, performance measures, and web services that allow for meaningful evaluations. The main goal is to provide for sustainable and reproducible evaluations, to get a clear view of the capabilities of state-ofthe-art-algorithms. The tasks are: author identi cation; author pro ling; and, author obfuscation.
CLEFeHealth7 provides scenarios which aim to ease patients and nurses understanding and accessing of eHealth information. The goals of the lab are to develop processing methods and resources in a multilingual setting to enrich di cult-to-understand eHealth texts, and provide valuable documentation. The tasks are: multilingual Information extraction; technologically assisted reviews in empirical medicine; and, patient-centred information retrieval.
Cultural Microblog Contextualization (CMC) Workshop8 deals with how cultural context of a microblog a ects its social impact at large. This involves microblog search, classi cation, ltering, language recognition, localization, entity extraction, linking open data and summarization. Regular Lab participants have access to the private massive multilingual microblog stream of The festival galleries project.
ImageCLEF9 organises 3 main tasks with a global objective of benchmarking lifelogging retrieval and summarization, tuberculosis type prediction from CT images and bio-medical image caption prediction; and a pilot task on remote sensing image analysis.
Early risk prediction on the Internet (eRisk)10 explores issues of evaluation methodology, e ectiveness metrics and other processes related to early risk detection. Early detection technologies can be employed in di erent areas, particularly those related to health and safety. For instance, early alerts could be sent when a predator starts interacting with a child for sexual purposes, or when a potential o ender starts publishing antisocial threats on a blog, forum or social network. Our main goal is to pioneer a new interdisciplinary research area that would be potentially applicable to a wide variety of situations and to many di erent personal pro les.
Personalised Information Retrieval at CLEF (PIR-CLEF)11 provides a framework for evaluation of Personalised Information Retrieval (PIR). Current 6 http://pan.webis.de/ 7 https://sites.google.com/site/clefehealth2017/ 8 https://mc2.talne.eu/ 9 http://imageclef.org/2017 10 http://early.irlab.org/ 11 http://www.ir.disco.unimib.it/pirclef2017/ approaches to the evaluation of PIR are user-centered, i.e., they rely on experiments that involve real users in a supervised environment, PiR-CLEF aims to develop and demonstrate a methodology for evaluation PIR which enables repeatable experiments to enable the detailed exploration of personal models and their exploitation in IR.
Dynamic Search for Complex Tasks12 Information Retrieval research has traditionally focused on serving the best results for a single query { socalled ad hoc retrieval. However, users typically search iteratively, re ning and reformulating their queries during a session. A key challenge in the study of this interaction is the creation of suitable evaluation resources to assess the e ectiveness of IR systems over sessions. The goal of the CLEF Dynamic Search lab is to propose and standardize an evaluation methodology that can lead to reusable resources and evaluation metrics able to assess retrieval performance over an entire session, keeping the \user" in the loop.
Multimodal Spatial Role Labeling13 explores the extraction of spatial information from two information resources that is image and text. This is important for various applications such as semantic search, question answering, geographical information systems and even in robotics for machine understanding of navigational instructions or instructions for grabbing and manipulating objects.
CLEF has been always backed by European projects which complement the incredible amount of volunteering work performed by Lab Organizers and the CLEF community with the resources needed for its necessary central coordination, in a similar manner to the other major international evaluation initiatives as TREC, NTCIR, FIRE and MediaEval. Since 2014, the organisation of CLEF no longer has direct support from European projects and working to transform itself into a self-sustainable activity. This is being made possible thanks to the establishment in late 2013 of the CLEF Association14, a non-pro t legal entity, which, through the support of its members, ensures the resources needed to smoothly run and coordinate CLEF.
We would like to thank the members of CLEF-LOC (the CLEF Lab Organization Committee) for their thoughtful and elaborate contributions to assessing the proposals during the selection process: Martin Braschler, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland Donna Harman, National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), USA Marteen de Rijke, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands 12 https://ekanou.github.io/dynamicsearch/ 13 http://www.cs.tulane.edu/~pkordjam/mSpRL_CLEF_lab.htm/ 14 http://www.clef-initiative.eu/association
Last but not least without the important and tireless e ort of the enthusiastic and creative proposal authors, the organizers of the selected labs and workshops, the colleagues and friends involved in running them, and the participants who contribute their time to making the labs and workshops a success, the CLEF labs would not be possible.
Thank you all very much! July, 2017
Organization CLEF 2017, Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum { Experimental IR meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction, was organized by the ADAPT Centre in Dublin City University and Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
Martin Braschler, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
Carol Peters, ISTI, National Council of Research (CNR), Italy (Steering Committee Chair 2000{2009) Emanuele Pianta, Centre for the Evaluation of Language and Communication Technologies (CELCT), Italy