A multilingual approach to multilingual information retrieval

Abstract

Multilingual IR is usually carried out by first performing cross-language IR on separate collections, each for a language. Once a set of answers has been found in each language, all the sets are merged to produce a unique answer list. In our experiments of CLEF2002, we propose a truly multilingual approach in which the documents in different languages are mixed in the same collection. Indexes arc associated with a language tag so as to distinguish homographs in different languages. The indexing and retrieval processes can then be done once for all the languages. No result merging is required. This paper describes our first tests in CLEF2002. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.