The CLEF 2002 Interactive Track

In the CLEF 2002 Interactive Track, research groups interested in the design of systems to support interactive Cross-Language Retrieval used a shared experiment design to explore aspects of that question. Participating teams each compared two systems, both supporting a full retrieval task where users had to select relevant documents given a (native language) topic and a (foreign language) document collection. The two systems being compared at each site should differ in (at least) one of these aspects: a) support for document selection (how the system describes the content of a document written in a foreign language), b) support for query translation (how the system interacts with the user in order to obtain an optimal translation of the query), and c) support for query refinement (how the system helps the user refine their query based on previous search results). This paper describes the shared experiment design and summarizes preliminary results from the five teams that submitted runs.