Report on CLEF 2002 Experiments: Combining Multiple Sources of Evidence

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.