SINAI at GeoCLEF 2006: Expanding the topics with geographical information and thesaurus

This paper describes the first participation of the SINAI (Intelligent Systems of Access Information) group of the University of Jaén in GeoCLEF 2006. We have developed a system made up of three main modules. The first one is the translation subsystem, that works with queries into Spanish, Portuguese and Deutsche. The second one is the query expansion subsystem, that integrates a Named Entity Recognizer, a Gazetteer, a Thesaurus expansion module and a Geographical information module. The last subsystem is the Information Retrieval module, that works with collections and queries into English, and returns the result file. We have made several runs, that combines these modules to resolve the monolingual and the bilingual tasks. The results obtained shown that the use of geographical and thesaurus information for query expansion does not improve the retrieval, but this is the first step to try to improve the system in the future