Exeter at CLEF 2001: Experiments with machine translation for bilingual retrieval

Abstract

The University of Exeter participated in the CLEF 2001 bilingual task. The main objectives of our experiments were to compare retrieval performance for different topic languages with similar easily available machine translation resources and to explore the application of new pseudo relevance feedback techniques recently developed at Exeter to Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). We also report recent experimental results from our investigations of the combination of results from alternative machine translation outputs; specifically we look at the use of data fusion of the output from individual retrieval runs and merging of alternative topic translations.