Cross-language spoken document retrieval on the TREC SDR collection

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary experiments on cross-language spoken document retrieval (SDR) carried out on a benchmark assembled at ITC-irst. The benchmark is based on resources used in the last two spoken document retrieval tracks at the TREC conference, which are available on the Internet. They include automatic transcripts of American English broadcast news, short topics written in English, and relevance assessments. The extension from monolingual to cross-language SDR was obtained by translating all topics into five European languages: Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. In this paper preliminary experiments on the last four languages are presented. Translations of the topics will be used to run a pilot track in CLEF 2003. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.