CLEF 2003 experiments at UB: Automatically generated phrases and relevance feedback for improving CLIR

Abstract

This paper presents the results obtained by the University at Buffalo (UB) in CLEF 2003. Our efforts concentrated in the monolingual retrieval and large multilingual retrieval tasks. We used a modified version of the SMART system, a heuristic method based on bigrams to generate phrases that works across multiple languages, and pseudo relevance feedback. Query translation was performed using publicly available machine translation software. Our results show small but consistent improvements in performance due to the use of bigrams. We also found that pseudo relevance feedback benefits from using these bigrams for expanding queries in all the 8 languages that we tested. © Springer-Verlag 2004.