Accessing Multilingual Information Repositories : 6th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2005, Vienna, Austria, 21-23 September, 20

§16§The sixth campaign of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for European languages was held from January to September 2005. CLEF is by now an established international evaluation initiative and 74 groups from all over the world submitted results for one or more of the different evaluation tracks in 2005, compared with 54 groups in 2004. There were eight distinct evaluation tracks, designed to test the performance of a wide range of systems for multilingual information access. 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. As always the results of the campaign were reported and discussed at the annual workshop held in Vienna, Austria, September 21-23, immediately following the ninth European Conference on Digital Libraries. The workshop was attended by approximately 110 academic and industrial researchers and system developers. In a §16§ddition to presentations by participants in the campaign, Noriko Kando from the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, gave an invited talk on the activities of the NTCIR evaluation initiative for Asian languages. Breakout sessions gave participants a chance to discuss ideas and results in detail. The final session was dedicated to proposals for activities for CLEF 2006. The presentations given at the workshop can be found on the CLEF Web site at: www. clef-campaign. org. We should like to thank the other members of the CLEF Steering Committee for their assistance in the coordination of this event. §04§What Happened in CLEF 2005.- I. Multilingual Textual Document Retrival (Ad Hoc).- Cross-Language and More.- Monolingual Experiments.- II. Domain-Specific Information Retrieval (Domain-Specific).- III. Interactive Cross-Language Information Retrieval (iCLEF).- IV. Multiple Language Question Answering (QA@CLEF).- V. Cross-Language Retrieval In Image Collections (ImageCLEF).- VI. Cross-Language Speech Retrieval (CL-SR).- VII. Multilingual Web Track (WebCLEF).- VIII. Cross-Language Geographical Retrieval (GeoCLEF).- Evaluation Issues. §04§for English and German.- The Dipe System at CLEF-QA 2005.- An XML-Based System for Spanish Question Answering.- A Logic Programming Based Approach to QA@CLEF05 Track.- Extending Knowledge and Deepening Linguistic Processing for the Question Answering System InSicht.- Question Answering for Dutch Using Dependency Relations.- Term Translation Validation by Retrieving Bi-terms.- Exploiting Linguistic Indices and Syntactic Structures for Multilingual Question Answering: ITC-irst at CLEF 2005.- The TALP-QA System for Spanish at CLEF 2005.- Priberam's Question Answering System for Portuguese.- A Full Data-Driven System for Multiple Language Question Answering.- Experiments on Cross-Linguality and Question-Type Driven Strategy Selection for Open-Domain QA.- QUASAR: The Question Answering System of the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.- Towards an Offline XML-Based Strategy for Answering Questions.- AliQAn, Spanish QA System at CLEF-2005.- 20th Century Esfinge (Sphinx) Solving the Rid §04§dles at CLEF 2005.- Question Answering Experiments for Finnish and French.- MIRACLE's Cross-Lingual Question Answering Experiments with Spanish as a Target Language.- The Role of Lexical Features in Question Answering for Spanish.- Cross-Language French-English Question Answering Using the DLT System at CLEF 2005.- Finding Answers to Indonesian Questions from English Documents.- BulQA: Bulgarian-Bulgarian Question Answering at CLEF 2005.- The Query Answering System PRODICOS.- V. Cross-Language Retrieval In Image Collections (ImageCLEF).- The CLEF 2005 Cross-Language Image Retrieval Track.- Linguistic Estimation of Topic Difficulty in Cross-Language Image Retrieval.- Dublin City University at CLEF 2005: Experiments with the ImageCLEF St Andrew's Collection.- A Probabilistic, Text and Knowledge-Based Image Retrieval System.- UNED at ImageCLEF 2005: Automatically Structured Queries with Named Entities over Metadata.- Easing Erroneous Translations in Cross-Language Image Retrieval Usi