8th Conference of the CLEF Initiative in Dublin

Author: Andreas Lommatzsch

The 8th conference of the CLEF initiative has been held at the Trinity College in Dublin from September 11th till September 14th. The CLEF initiative is a European campaign focusing on evaluation methods in Information Retrieval and related fields.

The News Recommendation Lab (NewsREEL) runs as a CLEF lab the third year. NewsREEL gives researchers the ability to evaluate news recommendation algorithm both online and offline. The stream-based data, the use multi-dimensional benchmarking (taking into account precision and technical metrics) as well as the evaluation based on live user feedback make NewsREEL special CLEF lab.

In the NewsREEL workshop the participating teams presented the evaluated algorithms. The spectrum of implemented solutions covered a wide spectrum of approaches ranging from framework-based approaches (using abstract query languages) to more experimental approaches (using Contextual Bandits). The enabled a vivid, fruitful discussion between the participating teams. Detailed descriptions of the approaches are explained in the working notes.

Co-located with CLEF 2017, the yearly conference of the MediaEval Benchmarking Initiative was held. Several joint conference sessions and poster sessions provided the basis for interesting discussions and the exchange of ideas. Hopefully, the cooperation between the two benchmarking initiatives will continue in the future.

NewsREEL will continue also in 2018. It will not run as a CLEF lab in order to focus stronger on data mining and recommender algorithms.

The following photos give a visual impression from the Trinity College Campus in Dublin as well as from the CLEF conference and MediaEval conference.