Clairvoyance CLEF-2003 experiments

Abstract

In CLEF 2003, Clairvoyance participated in the bilingual retrieval track with the German and Italian language pair. As we did not have any German-to-Italian translation resources, we used the Babel Fish translation service provided by altavista.com for translating German topics into Italian, with English as a pivot language. Then the translated Italian topics were used for retrieving Italian documents from the Italian document collection. The translated Italian topics and the document collections were indexed using three different kinds of units: (1) linguistically meaningful units, (2) character 6-grams, and (3) a combination of 1 and 2. We submitted three automatic runs, one for each of the three different indexing units. © Springer-Verlag 2004.