We invite submissions for the CLEF 2014 Conference on all aspects of Information Access in any modality and language. A series of workshops presenting the results of lab-based comparative/competitive evaluations are attached to the main Conference. This is the 15th year of the CLEF initiative as a forum for Information Access Evaluation, with special attention to multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search.

All submissions to the CLEF main conference will be reviewed on the basis of relevance, originality, importance, and clarity. CLEF welcomes papers that describe rigorous hypothesis testing regardless of whether the results are positive or negative. Methods are expected to be written so that they are reproducible by others, and the logic of the research design is clearly described in the paper. The conference proceedings will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

Topics
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Relevant topics for the CLEF 2014 Conference include but are not limited to:

* Information Access in any language or modality: Information retrieval, Image Retrieval, Question Answering, Search Interfaces and Design, Infrastructures, etc.
* Visual Analytics for Information Retrieval: theoretical and practical results in the Visual Analytics field that are specifically targeted for Information Access data analysis.
* Evaluation Initiatives: Conclusions, lessons learned, impact and projection of any evaluation initiative after completing their cycle.
* Evaluation: methodologies, metrics, statistical and analytical tools, component based, user groups and use cases, ground-truth creation, impact of multilingual/multicultural/multimodal differences, etc.
* Technology Transfer: Economic impact/sustainability of information access approaches, deployment and exploitation of systems, case studies, etc.
* Interactive Information Retrieval Evaluation: the interactive evaluation of IR systems using user-centered methods, evaluation of novel search interfaces, novel interactive evaluation methods, etc.
* Specific Application Domains: Information access and its evaluation in application domains such as cultural heritage, digital libraries, social media, expert search, health information, etc.

Format
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Authors are invited to submit electronically original papers, which have not been published and are not under consideration elsewhere, using the LNCS proceedings format:
* http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0

Two types of papers are solicited:
* Long papers: 12 pages max. Aimed to report complete research works.
* Short papers: 6 pages max. Position papers, new evaluation proposals, developments and applications, etc.

Papers will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 members of the program committee. Selection will be based on originality, clarity, and technical quality. Papers should be submitted in PDF format to the following address:
* https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clef2014

Dates
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* Submission of Papers: April 28 2014
* Notification of Acceptance: June 15 2014
* Camera Ready: June 30 2014
* Conference: September 15-18 2014

Organization
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General Chairs
Paul Clough, Information School, University of Sheffield
Mark Sanderson, School of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University Melbourne

Program Chairs
Evangelos Kanoulas, Google Switzerland GmbH
Mihai Lupu, Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology

Evaluation lab chairs
Martin Halvey, Computer, Communication & Interactive Systems, Glasgow Caledonian University
Wessel Kraaij, TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research) and Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Proceedings chairs
Elaine Toms, Information School, University of Sheffield
Allan Hanbury, Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology

Local Organization
Robert Villa, Information School, University of Sheffield
Mark Hall, Department of Computing, Edge Hill University