CLEF 2005 | How to Participate

How to Participate

In order to participate in CLEF 2005 and have access to the test collections, a registration form and the relevant data release forms must be first compiled, signed, and sent to Carol Peters at the address below (except for the web collection - see following). On receipt of the forms, you will be sent information on how to download the data. For copyright reasons, we have 3 separate sets of data release forms: one for the US newspaper data, one for the EuroGOV web collection, and one for all other document collections (text, image and speech). The EuroGOV forms are downloadable from the WebCLEF  website and should be compiled and sent to the WebCLEF coordinators at the University of Amsterdam. The others are accessible here below.

Some information is repeated on the different forms. The reason for this is that they will be kept on different sites. All forms must be signed by a person authorised by your organisation for such signatures (e.g. Department or Administrative Head or similar).
Please note that previous CLEF participants must resubmit End-User Agreements each year in order to renew their authorisation to access the data covered by this agreement.

Please compile the forms carefully, inserting all relevant information. Read the task descriptions in the Agenda for CLEF 2005 to see which data collections you should request - this depends on the tasks you will be performing. Remember that access to the data will only be provided when we have received signed, original copies of the forms (not electronic or fax versions).

End-User Agreement

The End-User Agreement must be submitted in two original signed copies. It  Even if you have already participated in a CLEF campaign and have access to some of the data, you must have this form (in two copies) compiled and signed by the appropriate person in your organisation in order to be authorised to continue to use the data for CLEF 2005. You should indicate on this form only the data sets you need, depending on the tasks that you intend to perform. On receipt of the two copies of this form, they will both be signed on behalf of CLEF, and one will be kept in our archives and the other will be returned to you.

NIST Data Release Forms for American-English Data

The conditions to use the Los Angeles Times collection are unaltered from previous campaigns. You only need to complete these Data Agreement forms if you have not already been granted access to this data. Please note that only the Organisation Application must be sent to me; the Individual Application is to be kept by your organisation.

Organisation Application

Individual Application

Multilingual Document Collection

News Documents

The CLEF document collection consists of SGML or XML-formatted documents from national newspapers,  journals and news agencies from the same time period (1994 and 1995), as follows:
Dutch: NRC Handelsblad - 1994, 1995; Algemeen Dagblad - 1994, 1995
English: Los Angeles Times - 1994; The Herald -1995
Finnish: Aamulehti - 1995 (+small amount of 94 data);
French: Le Monde - 1994, 1995; SDA French Swiss news agency data - 1994, 1995
German:  Frankfurter Rundschau - 1994, 1995; Der Spiegel - 1994; SDA German Swiss news agency data - 1994, 1995
Italian: La Stampa - 1994; SDA Italian Swiss news agency data - 1994, 1995
Portuguese: Público (Portuguese newspaper)- 1994, 1995; Folha - 1994; 1995 (Brazilian newspaper - under negotiation)
Russian: Izvestia - 1995
Spanish: Agencia EFE S.A. (Spanish news agency data) - 1994, 1995
Swedish: Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå -1994, 1995

plus the following newspapers for 2002
Bulgarian: Sega - 2002; Standart - 2002
Hungarian: Magyar Hirlap - 2002

Domain-Specific Collection
GIRT4 (German Indexing and Retrieval Testdatabase)
RSSC (Russian Social Science Corpus) (under negotiation)

Image Collections
St Andrews University Library Historical Photographic Collection
ImageCLEFmed Radiological Medical Database
IRMA Database of Medical Images

Web Collection
EuroGOV - web documents crawled from European governmental sites - late 2004

Spoken Documents
MALACH Collection spontaneous conversational speech from the Shoah archives

Topics/Questions

The topic/question sets will be made accessible in the Workspace for Registered Participants, from 15 March on. Topics will be prepared in a number of languages depending on the task. Please refer to track/task descriptions. Other languages may be added depending on demand.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support of all the data providers and copyright holders, and in particular:

• The Los Angeles Times, for the American-English data collection;

• SMG Newspapers (The Herald) for the British-English data collection 

• Le Monde S.A. and ELDA: Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency, for the French data.

• Frankfurter Rundschau, Druck und Verlagshaus Frankfurt am Main; Der Spiegel, Spiegel Verlag, Hamburg, for the German newspaper collections.

• InformationsZentrum Sozialwissen-schaften, Bonn, for the GIRT database

• SocioNet system for the Russian Social Science Corpora

• Hypersystems Srl, Torino and La Stampa, for the Italian data.

• Agencia EFE S.A. for the Spanish data.

• NRC Handelsblad, Algemeen Dagblad and PCM Landelijke dagbladen/Het Parool for the Dutch newspaper data.

• Aamulehti Oyj and Sanoma Osakeyhtiö for the Finnish newspaper data

• Russika-Izvestia for the Russian newspaper data

• Público, Portugal, and Linguateca for the Portuguese (PT) newspaper collection

• Folha, Brazil, and Linguateca for the Portuguese (BR) newspaper collection

• Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (TT) SE-105 12 Stockholm, Sweden for the Swedish newspaper data

• Schweizerische Depeschenagentur, Switzerland, for the French, German and Italian Swiss news agency data

• Ringier Kiadoi Rt. [Ringier Publishing Inc.].and the Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Acad. Sci. for the Hungarian newspaper documents

• Sega AD, Sofia; Standart Nyuz AD, Sofia, and the BulTreeBank Project, Linguistic Modelling Laboratory, IPP, Bulgarian Acad. Sci, for the Bulgarian newspaper documents

• St Andrews University Library for the historic photographic archive

• University and University Hospitals, Geneva, Switzerland and Oregon Health and Science University for the ImageCLEFmed Radiological Medical Database

• Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), Germany for the IRMA database of annotated medical images.

• The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and IBM for the Malach spoken document collection
   

Without their help, this evaluation activity would be impossible.

Please mail all forms by express or priority post to the address below. Access to the data will be provided only on receipt of the relevant forms.