Using corpus-based approaches in a system for multilingual information retrieval

We present a system for multilingual information retrieval that allows users to formulate queries in their preferred language and retrieve relevant information from a collection containing documents in multiple languages. The system is based on a process of document level alignments, where documents of different languages are paired according to their similarity. The resulting mapping allows us to produce a multilingual comparable corpus. Such a corpus has multiple interesting applications. It allows us to build a data structure for query translation in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). Moreover, we also perform pseudo relevance feedback on the alignments to improve our retrieval results. And finally, multiple retrieval runs can be merged into one unified result list. The resulting system is inexpensive, adaptable to domain-specific collections and new languages and has performed very well at the TREC-7 conference CLIR system comparison.