CLEF 2002 cross-language spoken document retrieval pilot track report

Abstract

The current expansion in collections of natural language based digital documents in various media and languages is creating challenging opportunities for automatically accessing the information contained in these documents. This paper describes the CLEF 2002 pilot track investigation of Cross-Language Spoken Document Retrieval (CLSDR) combining information retrieval, cross-language translation and speech recognition. The experimental investigation is based on the TREC-8 and TREC-9 SDR evaluation tasks, augmented to form a CLSDR task. The original task of retrieving English language spoken documents using English request topics is compared with cross-language retrieval using French, German, Italian and Spanish topic translations. The results of the pilot track establish baseline performance levels and indicate that pseudo relevance feedback and contemporaneous text document collections can be used to improve CLSDR performance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.