Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction 13th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2022, Bologna, Italy, September 5–8, 2022, Proceedings

Since 2000, the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) has played a leading role in stimulating research and innovation in the domain of multimodal and multilingual information access. Initially founded as the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum and running in conjunction with the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL/TPDL), CLEF became a standalone event in 2010 combining a peer-reviewed conference with a multi-track evaluation forum. The combination of the scientific pro- gram and the track-based evaluations at the CLEF conference creates a unique platform to explore information access from different perspectives, in any modality and language. The CLEF conference has a clear focus on experimental information retrieval (IR) as seen in evaluation forums (like the CLEF Labs, TREC, NTCIR, FIRE, MediaEval, RomIP, TAC) with special attention paid to the challenges of multimodality, multilin- guality, and interactive search, ranging from unstructured to semi-structured and struc- tured data. The CLEF conference invites submissions on new insights demonstrated by the use of innovative IR evaluation tasks or in the analysis of IR test collections and evaluation measures, as well as on concrete proposals to push the boundaries of the Cranfield/TREC/CLEF paradigm. CLEF 20221 was organized by the University of Bologna, Italy, and held during September 5–8, 2022. Despite the continued outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the improvement of the overall situation allowed for organizing CLEF 2022 as an in-person event, after two editions—CLEF 2020 and 2021—were forced to be virtual only. The conference format remained the same as in past years and consisted of keynotes, con- tributed papers, lab sessions, and poster sessions, including reports from other bench- marking initiatives from around the world. All sessions were held in person but also allowed for remote participation for those who were not able to attend physically. CLEF 2022 continued the initiative introduced in the 2019 edition, during which the European Conference for Information Retrieval (ECIR) and CLEF joined forces: ECIR 2022 hosted a special session dedicated to CLEF Labs where lab organizers presented the major outcomes of their labs and their plans for ongoing activities, which was followed by a poster session to encourage discussion during the conference. This was reflected in the ECIR 2022 proceedings, where CLEF Lab activities and results were reported as short papers. The goal was not only to engage the ECIR community in CLEF activities but also to disseminate the research results achieved during CLEF evaluation cycles through the submission of papers to ECIR. The following scholars were invited to give a keynote talk at CLEF 2022: Rita Cucchiara (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy) and Benno Stein (Bauhaus- Universität Weimar, Germany).