Dublin City University at CLEF 2004: Experiments in Monolingual, Bilingual and Multilingual Retrieval

The Dublin City University group participated in the monolingual, bilingual and multilingual retrieval tasks this year. The main focus of our investigation this year was extending our retrieval system to document languages other than English, and completing the multilingual task comprising four languages: English, French, Russian and Finnish. Results from our French monolingual experiments indicate that working in French is more effective for retrieval than adopting document and topic translation to English. However, comparison of our multilingual retrieval results using different topic and document translation reveals that this result does not extend to retrieved list merging for the multilingual task in a simple predictable way.