Introduction

The objective of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) is to develop and maintain an infrastructure for the testing and evaluation of information retrieval systems operating on European languages, and to create test-suites of reusable data that can be employed by system developers for benchmarking purposes. The second CLEF evaluation campaign was held from January to September 2001 and ended with a workshop held in Darmstadt, Germany, 3–4 September, in which the participants in the campaign reported their experiments and discussed their results.