English-Dutch CLIR Using Query Translation Techniques

We present a report on our participation in the English-Dutch bilingual task of the 2001 Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). We attempted to demonstrate that good cross language query translation results can be obtained by combining a dictionary based and parallel corpus based techniques. A parallel corpus based technique was used to choose the best sense from all possible senses found in the dictionary. However, our results demonstrate that a pure dictionary based technique produces the best query translation than a parallel corpus based and the combined techniques. We also show that improvement in retrieval effectiveness can be obtained using a query expansion technique.