Search Between Chinese and Japanese Text Collections

For NTCIR Workshop 6 UC Berkeley participated in Phase 1 of the bilingual task of the CLIR track. Our focus was upon Japanese topic search against the Chinese News Document Collection and upon Chinese topic searches retrieving from Japanese News document collection. We performed search experiments to segment and use Chinese search topics directly as if they were Japanese topics and vice versa. We also utilized Machine Translation (MT) software between Japanese and Chinese, with English as a pivot language. While Chinese search without translation against Japanese documents performed credibly well for title only runs, the reverse (Japanese topic search of Chinese documents without translation) was poor. We are investigating the reasons.