Working with Russian Queries for the GIRT, Bilingual, and Multilingual CLEF Tasks

For our activities within the CLEF 2001 evaluation, Berkeley Group One participated in the bilingual, multilingual and GIRT tasks focussing on the use of Russian queries. Performance on the Russian queries→English documents bilingual task was excellent, comparable to performance using German queries. For the multilingual task we utilized English as a pivot language between Russian and German and the English/French/German/Italian/Spanish document collections. Performance here was merely average. The GIRT task performed Russian → German Cross-Language IR by comparing web-available machine translation with lookup techniques on the GIRT thesaurus.