Report on Thomson Legal and Regulatory experiments at CLEF-2004

Abstract

Thomson Legal and Regulatory participated in the CLEF-2004 monolingual and bilingual tracks. Monolingual experiments included Portuguese, Russian and Finnish. We investigated a new query structure to handle Finnish compounds. Our main focus was bilingual search from German to French. Our approach used query translation and post-translation pseudo-relevance feedback. We compared two translation models for query translation, and captured compound translations through fertility probabilities. While the fertility-based approach picks good terms, it does not help improve bilingual retrieval. Pseudo-relevance feedback, on the other hand, resulted in improved average precision. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.