The BOLT IR Test Collections of Multilingual Passage Retrieval from Discussion Forums

This paper describes a new test collection for passage retrieval from multilingual, informal text. The task being modeled is that of a monolingual English-speaking user who wishes to search discussion forum text in a foreign language. The system retrieves relevant short passages of text and presents them to the user, translated into English. The test collection contains more than 2 billion words of discussion thread text, 250 queries representing complex informational search needs, and manual relevance judgments of forum post passages, pooled from real systems. This information retrieval test collection is the first to combine multilingual search, passage retrieval, and informal online genre text.