Evaluating Language Resources for English-Indonesian CLIR

We present a report on our participation in the Indonesian-English ad hoc bilingual task of the 2006 Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). This year we compare the use of several language resources to translate Indonesian queries into English. We used several readable machine dictionaries to perform the translation. We also used two machine translation techniques to translate the Indonesian queries. In addition to translating an Indonesian query set into English, we also translated English documents into Indonesian using the machine readable dictionaries and a commercial machine translation tool. The results show performing the task by translating the queries is better than translating the documents. Combining several dictionaries produced better result than only using one dictionary. However, the query expansion that we applied to the translated queries using the dictionaries reduced the retrieval effectiveness of the queries.