Exploring Topic-language Preferences in Multilingual Swahili Information Retrieval in Tanzania

Exploring Topic-based Language Models for Effective Web Information Retrieval

The main obstacle for providing focused search is the relative opaqueness of search request—searchers tend to express their complex information needs in only a couple of keywords. Our overall aim is to find out if, and how, topic-based language models can leads to more effective web information retrieval. In this paper we explore retrieval performance of a topic-based model that combines topica...

Cross-Language Information Retrieval in a Multilingual Legal Domain

We describe here the application of a cross-language information retrieval technique based on similarity thesauri in the domain of Swiss law. We present the theory of similarity thesauri, which are information structures deerived from corpora, and show how they can be used for cross-language retrieval. We also discuss the collections of Swiss legal documents and show how we have used them to co...

Experiments in Multilingual Information Retrieval

The multilingual information retrieval system of the future will need to be able to retrieve documents across language boundaries. This extension of the classical IR problem is particularly challenging, as signiicant resources are required to perform query translation. At Xerox, we are working to build a multilingual IR system and conducting a series of experiments to understand what factors ar...

Expanding a multilingual media monitoring and information extraction tool to a new language: Swahili

The Europe Media Monitor (EMM) family of applications is a set of multilingual tools that gather, cluster and classify news in currently fifty languages and that extract named entities and quotations (reported speech) from twenty languages. In this paper, we describe the recent effort of adding the African Bantu language Swahili to EMM. EMM is designed in an entirely modular way, allowing plugg...

Topic Models in Information Retrieval