Using various indexing schemes and multiple translations in the CL-SR task at CLEF 2005

Abstract

We present the participation of the University of Ottawa in the Cross-Language Spoken Document Retrieval task at CLEF 2005. In order to translate the queries, we combined the results of several online Machine Translation tools. For the Information Retrieval component we used the SMART system [1], with several weighting schemes for indexing the documents and the queries. One scheme in particular led to better results than other combinations. We present the results of the submitted runs and of many un-official runs. We compare the effect of several translations from each language. We present results on phonetic transcripts of the collection and queries and on the combination of text and phonetic transcripts. We also include the results when the manual summaries and keywords are indexed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.