Exeter at CLEF 2003: Experiments with machine translation for monolingual, bilingual and multilingual retrieval

The University of Exeter group participated in the monolingual, bilingual and multilingual-4 retrieval tasks this year. The main focus of our investigation this year was the small multilingual task comprising four languages, French, German, Spanish and English. We adopted a document translation strategy and tested four merging techniques to combine results from the separate document collections, as well as a merged collection strategy. For both the monolingual and bilingual tasks we explored the use of a parallel collection for query expansion and term weighting, and also experimented with extending synonym information to conflate British and American English word spellings