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Exploring New Languages with HAIRCUT at CLEF 2005

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Accessing Multilingual Information Repositories (CLEF 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4022))

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Abstract

JHU/APL has long espoused the use of language-neutral methods for cross-language information retrieval. This year we participated in the ad hoc cross-language track and submitted both monolingual and bilingual runs. We undertook our first investigations in the Bulgarian and Hungarian languages. In our bilingual experiments we used several non-traditional CLEF query languages such as Greek, Hungarian, and Indonesian, in addition to several western European languages. We found that character n-grams remain an attractive option for representing documents and queries in these new languages. In our monolingual tests n-grams were more effective than unnormalized words for retrieval in Bulgarian (+30%) and Hungarian (+63%). Our bilingual runs made use of subword translation, statistical translation of character n-grams using aligned corpora, when parallel data were available, and web-based machine translation, when no suitable data could be found.

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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McNamee, P. (2006). Exploring New Languages with HAIRCUT at CLEF 2005. In: Peters, C., et al. Accessing Multilingual Information Repositories. CLEF 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4022. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11878773_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11878773_17

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-45697-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45700-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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