Savoy, Jacques

2006, Savoy, Jacques, Abdou, Samir, Peters, Carol

For our participation in the CLEF 2006 campaign, our first objective was to propose and evaluate a decompounding algorithm and a more aggressive stemmer for the Hungarian language. Our second objective was to obtain a better picture of the relative merit of various search engines for the French, Portuguese/ Brazilian and Bulgarian languages. To achieve this we evaluated the test-collections using the Okapi approach, some of the models derived from the Divergence from Randomness (DFR) family and a language model (LM), as well as two vector-processing approaches. In the bilingual track, we evaluated the effectiveness of various machine translation systems for a query submitted in English and automatically translated into the French and Portuguese languages. After blind query expansion, the MAP achieved by the best single MT system was around 95% for the corresponding monolingual search when French was the target language, or 83% with Portuguese. Finally, in the robust retrieval task we investigated various techniques in order to improve the retrieval performance of difficult topics.

2003, Savoy, Jacques, Peters, Carol, Gonzalo, Julio, Braschler, Martin, Kluck, Michael

For our third participation in the CLEF evaluation campaign, our first objective was to propose more effective and general stop-word lists for the Swedish, Finnish and Russian languages, along with an improved, more efficient and simpler stemming procedure for these three languages. Our second goal was to suggest a combined search approach based on a data fusion strategy that would work with various European languages. Included in this combined approach is a decompounding strategy for the German, Dutch, Swedish and Finnish languages.

2005, Savoy, Jacques, Berger, Pierre-Yves, Peters, Carol, Gey, F. C., Gonzalo, Julio, Muller, H., Jones, G. J. F., Kluck, Michae, Magnini, B., DeRijke, M.

For our fifth participation in the CLEF evaluation campaigns, our first objective was to propose an effective and general stop-word list as well as a light stemming procedure for the Hungarian, Bulgarian and Portuguese (Brazilian) languages. Our second objective was to obtain a better picture of the relative merit of various search engines when processing documents in those languages. To do so we evaluated our scheme using two probabilistic models and five vector-processing approaches. In the bilingual track, we evaluated both the machine translation and bilingual dictionary approaches applied to automatically translate a query submitted in English into various target languages. Finally, using the GIRT corpora (available in English, German and Russian), we investigated the variations in retrieval effectiveness that resulted when we included or excluded manually assigned keywords attached to the bibliographic records (mainly comprising a title and an abstract).

2002, Savoy, Jacques, Peters, Carol, Braschler, Martin, Gonzalo, Julio, Kluck, Michael

In our second participation in the CLEF retrieval tasks, our first objective was to propose better and more general stopword lists for various European languages (namely, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Finnish) along with improved, simpler and efficient stemming procedures. Our second goal was to propose a combined query-translation approach that could cross language barriers and also an effective merging strategy based on logistic regression for accessing the multilingual collection. Finally, within the Amaryllis experiment, we wanted to analyze how a specialized thesaurus might improve retrieval effectiveness.

2003, Savoy, Jacques, Peters, Carol, Gonzalo, Julio, Braschler, Martin, Kluck, Michael

For our third participation in the CLEF evaluation campaign, our objective for both multilingual tracks is to propose a new merging strategy that does not require a training sample to access the multilingual collection. As a second objective, we want to verify whether our combined query translation approach would work well with new requests.

2001, Savoy, Jacques, Peters, Carol, Braschler, Martin, Gonzalo, Julio, Kluck, Michael

In our first participation in CLEF retrieval tasks, the primary objective was to define a general stopword list for various European languages (namely, French, Italian, German and Spanish) and also to suggest simple and efficient stemming procedures for these languages. Our second aim was to suggest a combined approach that could facilitate effective access to multilingual collections.