Crosslanguage Retrieval Based on Wikipedia Statistics

Abstract

In this paper we present the methodology, implementations and evaluation results of the crosslanguage retrieval system we have developed for the Robust WSD Task at CLEF 2008. Our system is based on query preprocessing for translation and homogenisation of queries. The presented preprocessing of queries includes two stages: Firstly, a query translation step based on term statistics of cooccuring articles in Wikipedia. Secondly, different disjunct query composition techniques to search in the CLEF corpus. We apply the same preprocessing steps for the monolingual as well as the crosslingual task and thereby acting fair and in a similar way across these tasks. The evaluation revealed that the similar processing comes at nearly no costs for monolingual retrieval but enables us to do crosslanguage retrieval and also a feasible comparison of our system performance on these two tasks. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.