CLEF 2009 Ad Hoc Track Overview: Robust-WSD Task

The Robust-WSD at CLEF 2009 aims at exploring the contribution of Word Sense Disambiguation to monolingual and multilingual Information Retrieval. The organizers of the task provide documents and topics which have been automatically tagged with Word Senses from WordNet using several state-of-the-art Word Sense Disambiguation systems. The Robust-WSD exercise follows the same design as in 2008. It uses two languages often used in previous CLEF campaigns (English, Spanish). Documents were in English, and topics in both English and Spanish. The document collections are based on the widely used LA94 and GH95 news collections. All instructions and datasets required to replicate the experiment are available from the organizers website (http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/clirwsd/). The results show that some top-scoring systems improve their IR and CLIR results with the use of WSD tags, but the best scoring runs do not use WSD.