Talk:Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum

This may have been taken care of by now, but just in case this is still a candidate for speedy deletion:

The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum is an annual meeting of the minds with the intention of improving information retrieval across languages.

Don't you think information retrieval is important? That's what Wikipedia is, isn't it? That's what Google is, and iTunes, and Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), and basically the way you get any information out of any database.

And--still using Wikipedia as the model, especially because I believe they focus on it themselves--wouldn't it be nice if all the articles in English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia and French Wikipedia and Italian Wikipedia and every other language that Wikipedia is in... could be shared? Haven't you ever come across the perfect article... except it was in a different language?

THAT is what the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum is doing. They are trying to make information universally accessible across language barriers. It is a problem they are trying to solve, and as far as I am aware, they are the only group trying to solve it; most of the existing literature about this problem is from their annual conferences, so it seems like this is a significant organization.

I've mostly researched the medical imagery track, which is researchers' efforts to make medical image databases more efficient (since there are hundreds of thousands of images added to these databases daily, and there needs to be some way to automatically index and search them). But that's just one aspect of the forum. (Which is included in CLEF because images are something that are relevant across languages, and sharing them doesn't seem like it should be as difficult as it is.)

I started the article because, as I mentioned in my previous talk discussions (see below), I saw CLEF heavily referenced in the information retrieval papers I was reading, and I had no idea what it was. Something so heavily referenced surely deserves its own article--or at least a stub explanation of what it is.

Do I need to cite how many researchers are represented at each conference? Do I need to ask why the Melville Society or Bullen's Animal World or the Ghost Story Society are considered "important?"

Is this enough? I can keep going. Josconklin (talk) 12:02, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

This page was originally deleted in 2006 because it "wasn't a noteworthy event."

It's been four years. I have restarted/rewritten/reestablished the article with the confidence that it's noteworthy now.

CLEF comes up a lot in peer-reviewed literature about information retrieval, and there isn't much (if any) down-to-earth information about the forum. Most descriptions, both online and within journal articles, assume that the reader already knows what CLEF is all about. For those of us who aren't immersed in information retrieval culture, it would be nice to have a layman's description about what the heck the thing IS. It sure would've saved me a lot of frustration, anyway.

The original article may be somewhere in the depths of Wikipedia; it may be useful to flesh out this stub, but I didn't see it.Josconklin (talk) 22:55, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Oh and also THEY HAVE SEVERAL TRACKS DEDICATED TO IMPROVING WIKIPEDIA, including "retrieval from a Wikipedia collection containing images and structured information in several languages" and "uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Wikipedia Vandalism." (link) Come on Wikipedia, the least you can do is give them their own article. Josconklin (talk) 23:05, 28 May 2010 (UTC)