Overview of the CLEF eHealth 2020 Task 2: Consumer Health Search with ad-hoc and Spoken Queries

In this paper, we provide an overview of the CLEF eHealth Task 2 on Information Retrieval (IR), organized as part of the eighth annual edition of the CLEF eHealth evaluation lab by the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum. Its aim was to address laypeople’s difficulties in retrieving and digesting valid and relevant information, in their preferred language, to make health-centred decisions. The task was a novel extension of the most popular and established task in CLEF eHealth on Consumer Health Search (CHS), which makes responses to spoken ad-hoc queries. In total, five submissions were made to its two subtasks; three addressed the ad-hoc IR task on text data and two considered the spoken queries. Herein, we describe the resources created for the task and evaluation methodology adopted. We also summarize lab submissions and results. As in previous years, organizers have made data, methods, and tools associated with the lab tasks available for future research and development.