The ultimate goal for systems for multilingual information retrieval is to offer users the opportunity to query in a given language and retrieve a merged and ranked set of documents that match the query in any language. There will thus be three main evaluation tracks in CLEF 2000.
Interested groups can participate in any one or in all three tracks.
Newcomers to the activity may well choose to begin with the monolingual track in the first year and work up to the others in later years. The main task of CLEF 2000 requires searching a multilingual document collection, containing English, German, French, and Italian texts, for relevant documents. Using a selected topic language, the goal is to retrieve documents for all languages in the collection, listing the results in a merged, ranked list. The official topic languages for CLEF 2000 will be Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, plus possibly Finnish. However, it will also be possible to submit runs in which the document collection is queried in other languages.