University of Chicago at CLEF2004: Cross-language Text and Spoken Document Retrieval

The University of Chicago participated in the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum 2004 (CLEF2004) cross-language multilingual, bilingual, and spoken language tracks. Cross-language experiments focused on meeting the challenges of new languages with freely available resources. We found that modest e ectiveness could be achieved with the additional application of pseudo-relevance feedback to overcome some gaps in impoverished lexical resources. Experiments with a new dimensionality reduction approach for re-ranking of retrieved results yielded no improvement, however. Finally, spoken document retrieval experiments aimed to meet the challenges of unknown story boundary conditions and noisy retrieval through query-based merger of ne-grained overlapping windows and pseudo-feedback query expansion to enhance retrieval.