Evaluation of axiomatic approaches to crosslanguage retrieval

Abstract

Integrating word sense disambiguation into an information retrieval system could potentially improve its performance. This is the major motivation for the Robust WSD tasks of the Ad-Hoc Track of the CLEF 2009 campaign. For these tasks we have build a customizable and flexible retrieval system. The best performing configuration of this system is based on research in the area of axiomatic approaches to information retrieval. Further, our experiments show that configurations that incorporate word sense disambiguation (WSD) information into the retrieval process did outperform those without. For the monolingual task the performance difference is more pronounced than for the bilingual task. Finally, we are able to show that our query translation approach does work effectively, even if applied in the monolingual task. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.