The
Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (formerly
Cross-Language Evaluation Forum), or
CLEF, is an organization promoting research in multilingual
information access (currently focusing on
European languages). Its specific functions are to maintain an underlying framework for testing
information retrieval systems and to create
repositories of data for researchers to use in developing comparable
standards. The organization holds a forum meeting every September in Europe. Prior to each forum, participants receive a set of challenge tasks. The tasks are designed to test various aspects of information retrieval systems and encourage their development. Groups of researchers propose and organize campaigns to satisfy those tasks. The results are used as
benchmarks for the state of the art in the specific areas.,