Combination Approaches for Multilingual Text Retrieval

We describe the Eurospider component for Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) that has been employed for experiments at all three CLEF campaigns to date. The central aspect of our efforts is the use of combination approaches, effectively combining multiple language pairs, translation resources and translation methods into one multilingual retrieval system. We discuss the implications of building a system that allows flexible combination, give details of the various translation resources and methods, and investigate the impact of merging intermediate results generated by the individual steps. An analysis of the resulting combination system is given which also takes into account additional requirements when deploying the system as a component in an operational, commercial setting.