Blueprint of a Cross-Lingual Web Retrieval Collection

The world wide web is a natural setting for cross-lingual information retrieval; web content is essentially multilingual, and web searchers are often polyglots. Even though English has emerged as the lingua franca of the web, planning for a business trip or holiday usually involves digesting pages in a foreign language. The same holds for searching information about European culture, sports, economy, or politics. This paper discusses the blue-print of the WebCLEF track, a new evaluation activity addressing cross-lingual web retrieval within the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum in 2005.