Multilingual Information Retrieval: From Research To Practice

Carol Peters is a researcher at the Italian National Research Council’s “Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione.” Her main research activities concern the development of multilingual access mechanisms for digital libraries and evaluation methodologies for cross-language information retrieval systems. She was leader of the EU Sixth Framework project MultiMatch and coordinated the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) during its first ten years of activity. In 2009, in recognition of her work for CLEF, she was awarded the Tony Kent Strix Award.

Martin Braschler is a lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur. His main research interests are in the field of information retrieval evaluation, cross-language information retrieval, and natural language processing. He served as the technical coordinator of the cross-language track at the American TREC series of evaluation campaigns from 1997-1999, and was technical coordinator of the CLEF evaluation campaigns in Europe from their start in 2000 until 2004. Having previously served as head of research and innovation at Eurospider Information Technology AG, Zurich, Switzerland, a vendor of information retrieval solutions, until 2004, he has actively been involved in the transfer of state-of-the-art information retrieval technology to the commercial marketplace.

Paul Clough is a senior lecturer in the Information School at the University of Sheffield. He has worked on both technical and user-oriented aspects of information retrieval in areas that include Cross-Language IR (CLIR), Geographic IR (GIR), image retrieval and personalisation. An important area of his work has been on evaluating IR systems where he co-founded and helped co-ordinate the ImageCLEF evaluation campaign 2003-2010 and is currently involved in organising a TREC task on evaluating query sessions (the Session Track). He has been a Principal Investigator for Sheffield in 4 EU-funded projects (MultiMatch, Memoir, TrebleCLEF and PATHS), an AHRC-funded studentship on recommender systems and a project funded by the UK National Archives on improving information access.