English-to-French CLIR: A knowledge-light approach through character N-grams alignment

Abstract

This paper describes an extension of our work presented in the robust English-to-French bilingual task of the CLEF 2007 workshop, a knowledge-light approach for query translation in Cross-Language Information Retrieval systems. Our work is based on the direct translation of character n-grams, avoiding the need for word normalization during indexing or translation, and also dealing with out-of-vocabulary words. Moreover, since such a solution does not rely on language-specific processing, it can be used with languages of very different nature even when linguistic information and resources are scarce or unavailable. The results obtained have been very positive, and support the findings from our previous English-to-Spanish experiments. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.