Overview of WebCLEF 2008

We describe the WebCLEF 2008 task. Similarly to the 2007 edition of WebCLEF, the 2008 edition implements a multilingual "information synthesis" task, where, for a given topic, participating systems have to extract important snippets from web pages. We detail the task, the assessment procedure, the evaluation measures and results. Key words: Web retrieval, focused retrieval The WebCLEF 2008 task is based on its 2007 predecessor [4]: for a given topic (undirected information need of the type "Tell me all about X") automatic systems need to compile a set of snippets, extracting them from web pages found using Google. Thus, WebCLEF 2008 has similarities with (topic-oriented) multi-document summarization. In the remainder of the paper we describe the task, the submissions, the assessment procedure and the results. We also give an analysis of the evaluation measures and differences between the participating systems. 1 Task Description The user model for WebCLEF 2008 is th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CLEF
• Authors: Valentin Jijkoun, Maarten de Rijke
• Keywords: CLEF 2008, Evaluation Measures, Information Management, Web Pages, WebCLEF 2008 Task