INFILE (INformation, Filtering, Evaluation) is a cross-language filtering evaluation campaign jointly organized by CEA, University of Lille 3 (GERiiCO) and ELDA, with the support of CLEF (Cross Language Evaluation Forum).

Following the first edition already organized as a pilot track of CLEF 2008, the 2009 edition proposes two evaluation tasks:

• an interactive filtering task, as in the previous campaign,
• and a batch filtering task, which is a new task.

The three languages concerned by INFILE are Arabic, English and French. Systems participating in the campaign can be evaluated for both tasks or for only one and in either crosslingual or monolingual context.

The corpus consists of 300,000 news-wires in Arabic, English and French from the news agency Agence France Presse covering the 2004-2006 period. The news-wires are related to general news and events information and are comparable for Arabic, English and French.

A set of 50 profiles will be made available in 3 languages (Arabic, English and French), 30 of them are general news and events and 20 are related to scientific fields.

Although cross-lingual systems testing is encouraged, the campaign is also open to monolingual systems.

For the interactive task, evaluation will be performed using an automatic search of test systems with a simulated user feedback. Each system will be able to use the feedback at any time to increase performance.

News-wires are transmitted to participating systems through an automated interface. The systems return a Boolean response for each profile using the same interface. After reception of this response, and if requested by the participant, a feedback can be supplied, consisting of the expected profile assignment for the document submitted. A curve of the evolution of efficiency will be computed.

For the batch task, the whole corpus of documents and the set of profiles are provided to the participants and the systems are expected to return the results of the filtering system.

INFILE welcomes participation of any institution, academic or industrial. Participation is free of charge and participants can keep and use the development and evaluation data for free after the evaluations for research and development purposes.

In order to participate in INFILE, all participants must also register in the CLEF 2009 evaluation campaign via the CLEF website at: www.clef-campaign.org under CLEF 2009

• January 2009: Registration Opens.
• April 01st to May 30th, 2009 : session of Batch Filtering.
• June 01st to June 30th, 2009 : session of Adaptive Filtering.
• July 15th, 2009: Communication of Individual Results.
• August 30th, 2009 : Submission of Paper for CLEF.

info _at_ infile.org http://www.infile.org