Interactive cross-language searching: Phrases are better than terms for query formulation and refinement

Abstract

This paper summarizes the participation of the UNED group in the CLEF 2002 Interactive Track. We focused on interactive query formulation and refinement, comparing two approaches: a) a reference system that assists the user to provide adequate translations for terms in the query; and b) a proposed system that assists the user to formulate the query as a set of relevant phrases, and to select promising phrases in the documents to enhance the query. All collected evidence indicates that the phrase-based approach is preferable: the official Fα=0.8 measure is 65% better for the proposed system, and all users in our experiment preferred the phrase-based system as a simpler and faster way of searching. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.