CLEF 2026: 17th International Conference on Information Retrieval

From September 21 to 24, 2026, international experts in search technologies, artificial intelligence, and information retrieval will gather in Jena for the “Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum” (CLEF). Together with Prof. Dr. Matthias Hagen of Friedrich Schiller University Jena and Prof. Dr. Benno Stein of Bauhaus University Weimar, Prof. Dr. Martin Potthast (www.webis.de) is responsible for the scientific and organizational leadership of the 17th edition of this conference.

CLEF is one of the established international forums for the research and evaluation of systems that search for, index, and make information accessible. Since 2000, the initiative has been developing shared tasks, datasets, and evaluation methods that allow different systems to be tested under comparable conditions. A particular focus is placed on multilingual and multimodal information.

To this end, the CLEF initiative combines two formats: In the so-called “Evaluation Labs,” international research teams work on shared tasks and compare their approaches using defined datasets and criteria. The Labs are complemented by an academic conference where current research findings, new evaluation methods, and future challenges in information access are discussed.

The growing importance of these issues in light of generative AI is also reflected in the CLEF 2026 program: The keynote presentations address personalization and user representations in language models, open search infrastructures for AI agents, and the role of information retrieval in the age of generative AI.

Through the workshops “PAN” (pan.webis.de) and “Touché” (touche.webis.de), the University of Kassel is directly co-organizing two evaluation labs. These labs focus on methods of digital text forensics and algorithmic reasoning. This year’s shared tasks range from the detection of AI-generated texts and digital watermarks to authorship analysis and the identification of fallacies in arguments (fallacy detection).

CLEF 2026 is supported by theScientific Center for Information Technology Design (ITeG) at the University of Kassel and by the hessian.AI Center for Artificial Intelligence. In addition to Potthast, other researchers from the University of Kassel—including Theresa Elstner, Niklas Deckers, Klara Gutekunst, Ben Gerhards, Tim Hagen, and Simon Ruth—are involved in organizing CLEF 2026. In this way, the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is once again contributing its long-standing research expertise in information retrieval, machine learning, and digital text analysis to an international academic community.

CLEF 2026 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum
September 21–24, 2026
Friedrich Schiller University of Jena

Program, keynotes, and further information about the conference:
clef2026.clef-initiative.eu