Dear colleagues,

The submission deadline for CLEF 2026 has been extended to 25 May 2026 (AoE).

We invite submissions to the 17th Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2026), to be held in Jena, Germany, from 21–24 September 2026.

CLEF 2026 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum Information Access Evaluation meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Visualization https://clef2026.clef-initiative.eu/calls/papers/

Important Dates (AoE) * 25 May 2026: Extended full paper submission deadline (Long; Short; Past, Present, Future) * 29 May 2026: Best of 2025 Labs paper submission * 26 June 2026: Notification of acceptance * 17 July 2026: Camera-ready version due * 21–24 September 2026: Conference in Jena, Germany

Aim and Scope The CLEF Conference addresses all aspects of Information Access in any modality and language. CLEF consists of the presentation of research papers and a series of workshops presenting the results of lab-based comparative evaluation benchmarks.

CLEF 2026 continues the CLEF campaigns running since 2000, contributing to the systematic evaluation of information access systems through experimentation on shared tasks.

The conference focuses on experimental Information Access as carried out within evaluation forums such as CLEF Labs, TREC, NTCIR, FIRE, MediaEval, RomIP, SemEval, and TAC, with particular attention to multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search.

CLEF welcomes submissions describing rigorous hypothesis testing regardless of whether results are positive or negative. Reproducibility and clear research design are strongly encouraged, as are links to code and data repositories.

Topics of Interest

* Information retrieval, question answering, recommender systems, image retrieval, search interfaces, and infrastructures * Interactive and conversational search evaluation, including RAG systems * Analytics for information access * Reproducibility and replicability studies * Fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics, and explainability (FATE) * Low-resource and multilingual information access * Collaborative and social data models * User studies and crowdsourcing * Evaluation methodologies, metrics, and statistical tools * Technology transfer and deployment * Domain-specific applications (health, legal, cultural heritage, social media, etc.) * New data collections * Reflections on past achievements and future research directions

Paper Categories

* Long research papers: 12 pages + references * Short research papers: 6 pages + references * Past, Present, Future papers: up to 12 pages

For details on submission and formatting, please refer to https://clef2026.clef-initiative.eu/calls/papers/

Best Paper Award One outstanding paper will receive the CLEF 2026 Best Paper Award, sponsored by Springer LNCS, including a certificate and a €500 prize.

We look forward to your submissions and to welcoming you to Jena for CLEF 2026.

Best regards, Philipp Schaer, Eva Zangerle Program Committee Chairs CLEF 2026 ############################