Advances In Cross Language Information Retrieval

This book presents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of a workshop by the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum Campaign, CLEF 2002, held in Rome, Italy in September 2002. The 43 revised full papers presented together with an introduction and run data in an appendix were carefully reviewed and revised upon presentation at the workshop. The papers are organized in topical sections on systems evaluation experiments, cross language and more, monolingual experiments, mainly domain-specific information retrieval, interactive issues, cross-language spoken document retrieval, and cross-language evaluation issues and initiatives.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2007, held in Budapest, Hungary, September 2007. The revised and extended papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. There are 115 contributions in total and an introduction. The seven distrinct evaluation tracks in CLEF 2007, are designed to test the performance of a wide range of multilingual information access systems or system components. The papers are organized in topical sections on Multilingual Textual Document Retrieval (Ad Hoc), Domain-Specific Information Retrieval (Domain-Specific), Multiple Language Question Answering (QA@CLEF), cross-language retrieval in image collections (Image CLEF), cross-language speech retrieval (CL-SR), multilingual Web retrieval (WebCLEF), cross-language geographical retrieval (GeoCLEF), and CLEF in other evaluations.

This book presents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of a workshop by the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum Campaign, CLEF 2002, held in Rome, Italy in September 2002. The 43 revised full papers presented together with an introduction and run data in an appendix were carefully reviewed and revised upon presentation at the workshop. The papers are organized in topical sections on systems evaluation experiments, cross language and more, monolingual experiments, mainly domain-specific information retrieval, interactive issues, cross-language spoken document retrieval, and cross-language evaluation issues and initiatives.

Search for information is no longer exclusively limited within the native language of the user, but is more and more extended to other languages. This gives rise to the problem of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), whose goal is to find relevant information written in a different language to a query. In addition to the problems of monolingual information retrieval (IR), translation is the key problem in CLIR: one should translate either the query or the documents from a language to another. However, this translation problem is not identical to full-text machine translation (MT): the goal is not to produce a human-readable translation, but a translation suitable for finding relevant documents. Specific translation methods are thus required. The goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive description of the specific problems arising in CLIR, the solutions proposed in this area, as well as the remaining problems. The book starts with a general description of the monolingual IR and CLIR problems. Different classes of approaches to translation are then presented: approaches using an MT system, dictionary-based translation and approaches based on parallel and comparable corpora. In addition, the typical retrieval effectiveness using different approaches is compared. It will be shown that translation approaches specifically designed for CLIR can rival and outperform high-quality MT systems. Finally, the book offers a look into the future that draws a strong parallel between query expansion in monolingual IR and query translation in CLIR, suggesting that many approaches developed in monolingual IR can be adapted to CLIR. The book can be used as an introduction to CLIR. Advanced readers can also find more technical details and discussions about the remaining research challenges in the future. It is suitable to new researchers who intend to carry out research on CLIR. Table of Contents: Preface / Introduction / Using Manually Constructed Translation Systems and Resources for CLIR / Translation Based on Parallel and Comparable Corpora / Other Methods to Improve CLIR / A Look into the Future: Toward a Unified View of Monolingual IR and CLIR? / References / Author Biography

This book presents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of a workshop by the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum Campaign, CLEF 2002, held in Rome, Italy in September 2002. The 43 revised full papers presented together with an introduction and run data in an appendix were carefully reviewed and revised upon presentation at the workshop. The papers are organized in topical sections on systems evaluation experiments, cross language and more, monolingual experiments, mainly domain-specific information retrieval, interactive issues, cross-language spoken document retrieval, and cross-language evaluation issues and initiatives.

The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) was formed in the Computer Science Department ofthe University ofMassachusetts, Amherst in 1992. The core support for the Center came from a National Science Foun- tion State/Industry/University Cooperative Research Center(S/IUCRC) grant, although there had been a sizeable information retrieval (IR) research group for over 10 years prior to that grant. Thebasic goal ofthese Centers is to combine basic research, applied research, and technology transfer. The CIIR has been successful in each of these areas, in that it has produced over 270 research papers, has been involved in many successful government and industry collaborations, and has had a significant role in high-visibility Internet sites and start-ups. As a result of these efforts, the CIIR has become known internationally as one of the leading research groups in the area of information retrieval. The CIIR focuses on research that results in more effective and efficient access and discovery in large, heterogeneous, distributed, text and multimedia databases. The scope of the work that is done in the CIIR is broad and goes significantly beyond “traditional” areas of information retrieval such as retrieval models, cross-lingual search, and automatic query expansion. The research includes both low-level systems issues such as the design of protocols and architectures for distributed search, as well as more human-centered topics such as user interface design, visualization and data mining with text, and multimedia retrieval.

Search for information is no longer exclusively limited within the native language of the user, but is more and more extended to other languages. This gives rise to the problem of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), whose goal is to find relevant information written in a different language to a query. In addition to the problems of monolingual information retrieval (IR), translation is the key problem in CLIR: one should translate either the query or the documents from a language to another. However, this translation problem is not identical to full-text machine translation (MT): the goal is not to produce a human-readable translation, but a translation suitable for finding relevant documents. Specific translation methods are thus required. The goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive description of the specific problems arising in CLIR, the solutions proposed in this area, as well as the remaining problems. The book starts with a general description of the monolingual IR and CLIR problems. Different classes of approaches to translation are then presented: approaches using an MT system, dictionary-based translation and approaches based on parallel and comparable corpora. In addition, the typical retrieval effectiveness using different approaches is compared. It will be shown that translation approaches specifically designed for CLIR can rival and outperform high-quality MT systems. Finally, the book offers a look into the future that draws a strong parallel between query expansion in monolingual IR and query translation in CLIR, suggesting that many approaches developed in monolingual IR can be adapted to CLIR. The book can be used as an introduction to CLIR. Advanced readers can also find more technical details and discussions about the remaining research challenges in the future. It is suitable to new researchers who intend to carry out research on CLIR. Table of Contents: Preface / Introduction / Using Manually Constructed Translation Systems and Resources for CLIR / Translation Based on Parallel and Comparable Corpora / Other Methods to Improve CLIR / A Look into the Future: Toward a Unified View of Monolingual IR and CLIR? / References / Author Biography

The first evaluation campaign of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for European languages was held from January to September 2000. The campaign cul- nated in a two-day workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, 21 22 September, immediately following the fourth European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2000). The first day of the workshop was open to anyone interested in the area of Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) and addressed the topic of CLIR system evaluation. The goal was to identify the actual contribution of evaluation to system development and to determine what could be done in the future to stimulate progress. The second day was restricted to participants in the CLEF 2000 evaluation campaign and to their - periments. This volume constitutes the proceedings of the workshop and provides a record of the campaign. CLEF is currently an activity of the DELOS Network of Excellence for Digital - braries, funded by the EC Information Society Technologies to further research in digital library technologies. The activity is organized in collaboration with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The support of DELOS and NIST in the running of the evaluation campaign is gratefully acknowledged. I should also like to thank the other members of the Workshop Steering Committee for their assistance in the organization of this event.