Query expansion techniques for the CLEF bilingual track

Abstract

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a query translation and disambiguation as well as expansion techniques on CLEF Collections, using SMART Information Retrieval System. We focus on the query translation, disambiguation and methods to improve the effectiveness of an information retrieval. Dictionary-based method with a combination to statistics-based method is used, to avoid the problem of translation ambiguity. In addition, two expansion strategies are tested on their ability to improve the effectiveness of an information retrieval, an expansion via a relevance feedback before and after translation as well as an expansion via a domain feedback after translation. This method achieved 85.30% of the monolingual counterpart, in terms of average precision.