The multilingual European Thesaurus on International Relations and Area Studies (European Thesaurus) is a special subject thesaurus for the field of international affairs. It is intended for use in libraries and documentation centres of academic institutions and international organizations. The European Thesaurus was established in a collaborative project involving a number of leading European research institutes on international politics. It integrates the controlled terminologies of several existing thesauri. The European Thesaurus comprises about 8,200 terms and proper names from the 24 subject areas covered by the thesaurus. Because of its multilinguality, the European Thesaurus can not only be used for indexing, retrieval and terminological reference, but serves also as a translation tool for the languages represented. The establishment of cross-concordances to related thesauri extends the range of application of the European Thesaurus even further. They enable the treatment of semantic heterogeneity within subject gateways. The European Thesaurus is available both in a seven-lingual print-version as well as in an eight-lingual online-version. To reflect the changes in terminology the European Thesau-rus is regularly being amended and modified. Further languages are going to be included.

The objective of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) is to promote research in the multilingual information access domain. In this short paper, we list the achievements of CLEF during its first four years of activity and describe how the range of tasks has been considerably expanded during this period. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the importance of evaluation initiatives with respect to system research and development and to show how essential it is for such initiatives to keep abreast of and even anticipate the emerging needs of both system developers and application communities if they are to have a future.

The development of the evaluation of domain-specific cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is shown in the context of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) campaigns from 2000 to 2003. The pre-conditions and the usable data and additionally available instruments are described. The main goals of this task of CLEF are to allow the evaluation of Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) systems in the context of structured data and in a domain-specific area (not in the more general context of floating, journalistic texts), and with the additional possibility to make use of thesauri which had been used for intellectual indexing of the documents and are provided with the data. The parallel German-English GIRT4 corpus is described and some of the results of the CLEF 2004 campaign are discussed.