CoLesIR at CLEF 2007: from English to French via Character N-Grams.
Jesús Vilares, Michael Oakes, Manuel Vilares Ferro · CLEF (Working Notes) · 2007
This work is an extension of our proposal originally presented in CLEF 2006, which, unfortunately, could not be ready on time for the workshop. We describe here a knowledge-light approach for query translation in Cross-Language Information Retrieval systems. This proposal itself can be considered as an extension of the previous work of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, preserving its advantages but avoiding its main drawbacks. As in their original proposal, our work is based on the direct translation of character n-grams, avoiding in this way the need for word normalization during indexing or translation, and also dealing with out-of-vocabulary words. Moreover, since such a solution does not rely on language-specic processing, it can be used with languages of very dieren t natures even when linguistic information and resources are scarce or unavailable. Nevertheless, in contrast with the original approach, our proposal is much faster and transparent, making extensive use of freely available resources. The system has been tested in the robust ad-hoc English-to-French bilingual task, obtaining encouraging results.