ITC-irst at CLEF 2002: Using N-best query translations for CLIR

Abstract

This paper reports on the participation of ITC-irst in the Italian monolingual retrieval track and in the bilingual English-Italian track of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2002. A cross-language information retrieval system is proposed which integrates retrieval and translation scores over the set of N-best translations of the source query. Retrieval scores result as a combination of a statistical language model and a standard Okapi model. Translations are computed by a hidden Markov model, which is trained on a bilingual dictionary and the target document collection. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.