Overview of QuantumCLEF 2024: The Quantum Computing Challenge for Information Retrieval and Recommender Systems at CLEF

Andrea Pasin, Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema, Paolo Cremonesi, Nicola Ferro

Abstract: Quantum Computing (QC) is an innovative research field that has gathered the interest of many researchers in the last few years. In fact, it is believed that QC could potentially revolutionize the way we solve very complex problems by dramatically decreasing the time required to solve them. Even though QC is still in its early stages of development, it is already possible to tackle some problems by means of quantum computers and to start catching a glimpse of its potential. Therefore, the aim of the QuantumCLEF lab is to raise awareness about QC and to develop and evaluate new QC algorithms to solve challenges that can be encountered when implementing Information Retrieval (IR) and Recommender Systems (RS) systems. Furthermore, this lab represents a good opportunity to engage with QC technologies which are typically not easily accessible.