Combining Multiple Strategies for Effective Monolingual and Cross-Language Retrieval

This paper describes and evaluates different retrieval strategies that are useful for search operations on document collections written in various European languages, namely French, Italian, Spanish and German. We also suggest and evaluate different query translation schemes based on freely available translation resources. In order to cross language barriers, we propose a combined query translation approach that has resulted in interesting retrieval effectiveness. Finally, we suggest a collection merging strategy based on logistic regression that tends to perform better than other merging approaches.