GeoCLEF: The CLEF 2005 cross-language geographic information retrieval track overview

Abstract

GeoCLEF was a new pilot track in CLEF 2005. GeoCLEF was to test and evaluate cross-language geographic information retrieval (GIR) of text. Geographic information retrieval is retrieval oriented toward the geographic specification in the description of the search topic and returns documents which satisfy this geographic information need. For GeoCLEF 2005, twenty-five search topics were defined for searching against the English and German ad-hoc document collections of CLEF. Topic languages were English, German, Portuguese and Spanish. Eleven groups submitted runs and about 25,000 documents (half English and half German) in the pooled runs were judged by the organizers. The groups used a variety of approaches, including geographic bounding boxes and external knowledge bases (geographic thesauri and ontologies and gazetteers). The results were encouraging but showed that additional work needs to be done to refine the task for GeoCLEF in 2006. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.