Searching a Russian Document Collection using English, Chinese and Japanese Queries

As in CLEF 2003, Berkeley experimented with the CLEF Russian Izvestia document collection with monolingual and bilingual runs for the Russian collection. For CLEF 2004 we also experimented with Chinese and Japanese as topic languages, using English as the ‘pivot’ language. For bilingual retrieval our approaches were query translation (for English as a topic language) and ‘fast’ document translation from Russian to English (for Chinese and Japanese translated to English as the topic language). Chinese and Japanese topic retrieval significantly under-performed English Russian retrieval because of the ‘double translation’ loss of effectiveness.