The third campaignof the Cross-LanguageEvaluation Forum (CLEF) for Eu- pean languages was held from January to September 2002. Participation in this campaignshowedaslightriseinthenumberofparticipantswith,37groupsfrom both academia and industry and a steep rise in the number of experiments they submitted for oneor moreof the ?ve o?cialtracks. The campaignculminated in atwo-dayworkshopheldinRome,Italy,19-20September,immediatelyfollowing the Sixth European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2002), attended by nearly 70 researchersand system developers. The objective of the workshop was to bring together the groups that had participated in CLEF 2002 so that they could report on the results of their experiments. Attendance at the workshop was thus limited to participants in the campaignplus severalinvited guests with recognized expertise in the multilingual information access ?eld. This volume contains thoroughly revised and expanded versions of the preliminary papers presented at the workshop accompanied by a complete run-down and detailed analysis of the results, and it thus provides an exhaustive record of the CLEF 2002 campaign.
CLEF2002 wasconducted within the frameworkof a projectof the Infor- tion Society Technologies programme of the European Commission (IST-2000- 31002). The campaign was organized in collaboration with the US National - stitute ofStandardsandTechnology(NIST)andwiththe supportoftheDELOS Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries. The support of NIST and DELOS in the running of the evaluation campaign is gratefully acknowledged. We would also like to thank the other members of the Workshop Steering Committee for their assistance in the coordination of this event.