ITC-irst at CLEF 2002: Using N-best Query Translations for CLIR

This paper reports on the participation of ITC-irst in the Italian monolingual retrieval track and in the bilingual English-Italian track of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2002. A crosslanguage information retrieval systems is proposed which integrates retrieval and translation scores over the set of N-best translations of the source query. Translations are computed by a statistical translation model, based on an hidden Markov model, and trained over a bilingual dictionary and the target document collection. Retrieval scores result as a combination of a statistical language model and a standard Okapi model.