GikiCLEF: Crosscultural Issues in an International Setting: Asking non-English-centered Questions to Wikipedia

In this paper we provide a full overview of GikiCLEF, an evaluation contest (track) that was specifically designed to expose and investigate cultural and linguistic issues involved in multimedia collections and searching. In GikiCLEF, 50 topics were developed by a multilingual team with non-English users in mind. Answers should be found in Wikipedia, but not trivially, in the sense that the task should be difficult for human users as well. Crosslinguality was fostered and encouraged by the evaluation measures employed. We present the motivation and the organization process, the management system developed, dubbed SIGA, an overview of participation and results, concluding with what we have learned from the whole initiative.