INEX REPORT Report on INEX 2008 Gianluca Demartini Ludovic Denoyer Antoine Doucet Khairun Nisa Fachry Patrick Gallinari Shlomo Geva Wei-Che Huang Tereza Iofciu Jaap Kamps Gabriella Kazai Marijn Koolen Monica Landoni Ragnar Nordlie Nils Pharo Ralf Schenkel Martin Theobald Andrew Trotman Arjen P. de Vries Alan Woodley Jianhan Zhu Abstract INEX investigates focused retrieval from structured documents by providing large test collections of structured documents, uniform evaluation measures, and a forum for organiza- tions to compare their results. This paper reports on the INEX 2008 evaluation campaign, which consisted of a wide range of tracks: Ad hoc, Book, Efficiency, Entity Ranking, Inter- active, QA, Link the Wiki, and XML Mining. 1 Introduction Traditional search engines identify whole documents that are relevant to a user’s information need, the task of locating the relevant information within the document is left to the user. Next generation search engines will perform both tasks: they will identify relevant parts of relevant documents. A search engine that performs such a task is referred to as focused and the discipline is known as Focused Retrieval. The main goal of INEX is to promote the evaluation of focused retrieval by providing large test collections of structured documents, uniform evaluation measures, and a forum for organizations to compare their results. Focused Retrieval takes many forms. Hence, the INEX 2008 evaluation campaign con- sisted of a wide range of tracks: Ad hoc Track Investigating the effectiveness of XML-IR and Passage Retrieval for three ad hoc retrieval tasks (Focused, Relevant in Context, Best in Context). Book Track Investigating techniques to support users in reading, searching, and navigating full texts of digitized books. Efficiency Track Investigating the trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency of ranked XML retrieval approaches on real data and real queries. Entity Ranking Track Investigating entity retrieval rather than text retrieval: 1) Entity Ranking, 2) Entity List Completion. Interactive Track (iTrack) Investigating the behavior of users when interacting with XML documents, and retrieval approaches which are effective in user-based environments. Link-the-Wiki Track Investigating link discovery between Wikipedia documents, both at the file level and at the element level.