This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the CLEF Initiative, CLEF 2018, jointly organized by Avignon, Marseille and Toulon universities and held in Avignon, France, in September 2018. The conference has a clear focus on experimental information retrieval with special attention to the challenges of multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search ranging from unstructured to semi structures and structured data. The 13 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. Many papers tackle the medical ehealth and ehealth multimedia retrieval challenges, however there are many other topics of research such as document clustering, social biases in IR, social book search, personality profiling. Further this volume presents 9 "best of the labs" papers which were reviewed as a full paper submission with the same review criteria. The labs represented scientific challenges based on new data sets and real world problems in multimodal and multilingual information access. In addition to this, 10 benchmarking labs reported results of their yearlong activities in overview talks and lab sessions. The papers address all aspects of information access in any modularity and language and cover a broad range of topics in the field of multilingual and multimodal information access evaluation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Information Retrieval Societies Conference, AIRS 2012, held in Tianjin, China, in December 2012. The 22 full papers and 26 poster presentations included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: IR models; evaluation and user studies; NLP for IR; machine learning and data mining; social media; IR applications; multimedia IT and indexing; collaborative and federated search; and the poster session.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd China Conference on Information Retrieval, CCIR 2017, held in Shanghai, China, in July 2017. The 21 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections: recommendation; understanding users; NLP for IR; IR and applications; query processing and analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third CCF Conference, NLPCC 2014, held in Shenzhen, China, in December 2014. The 35 revised full papers presented together with 8 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 110 English submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on fundamentals on language computing; applications on language computing; machine translation and multi-lingual information access; machine learning for NLP; NLP for social media; NLP for search technology and ads; question answering and user interaction; web mining and information extraction.

Search for information is no longer exclusively limited within the native language of the user, but is more and more extended to other languages. This gives rise to the problem of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), whose goal is to find relevant information written in a different language to a query. In addition to the problems of monolingual information retrieval (IR), translation is the key problem in CLIR: one should translate either the query or the documents from a language to another. However, this translation problem is not identical to full-text machine translation (MT): the goal is not to produce a human-readable translation, but a translation suitable for finding relevant documents. Specific translation methods are thus required. The goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive description of the specific problems arising in CLIR, the solutions proposed in this area, as well as the remaining problems. The book starts with a general description of the monolingual IR and CLIR problems. Different classes of approaches to translation are then presented: approaches using an MT system, dictionary-based translation and approaches based on parallel and comparable corpora. In addition, the typical retrieval effectiveness using different approaches is compared. It will be shown that translation approaches specifically designed for CLIR can rival and outperform high-quality MT systems. Finally, the book offers a look into the future that draws a strong parallel between query expansion in monolingual IR and query translation in CLIR, suggesting that many approaches developed in monolingual IR can be adapted to CLIR. The book can be used as an introduction to CLIR. Advanced readers can also find more technical details and discussions about the remaining research challenges in the future. It is suitable to new researchers who intend to carry out research on CLIR. Table of Contents: Preface / Introduction / Using Manually Constructed Translation Systems and Resources for CLIR / Translation Based on Parallel and Comparable Corpora / Other Methods to Improve CLIR / A Look into the Future: Toward a Unified View of Monolingual IR and CLIR? / References / Author Biography