Across the Bridge: CLEF 2001 - Non-English Monolingual Retrieval. The French task

This paper presents work on document retrieval based on participation in the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2001 task of non-English monolingual retrieval task using French only. In summary, the experiment findings indicate that Okapi, the text retrieval system in use, can successfully be used for non-English text retrieval although a lot of internal pre-processing is required in the basic search system to convert the documents and topics into Okapi access formats. Various shell scripts were written to achieve the conversion in a Unix environment, failure of which would significantly have impeded the overall performance. Based on the experiment findings using Okapi, which was originally designed for the English Language, it was clear that there was significant difference between French and English retrieval depending on the retrieval system in use.