Multilingual Information Access for Text, Speech and Images (CLEF 2004)

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 5th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2004, held in Bath, UK in September 2004.

The papers are organized in topical sections on ad hoc text retrieval tracks (mainly cross-language experiments and monolingual experiments), domain-specific document retrieval, interactive cross-language information retrieval, multiple language question answering, cross-language retrieval in image collections, cross-language spoken document retrieval, and on issues in CLIR and in evaluation.

Table of Contents
What Happened in CLEF 2004?
Part I. Ad Hoc Text Retrieval Tracks
CLEF 2004: Ad Hoc Track Overview and Results Analysis
Mainly Cross-Language Experiments Selection and Merging Strategies for Multilingual Information Retrieval
Using Surface-Syntactic Parser and Deviation from Randomness
Cross-Language Retrieval Using HAIRCUT at CLEF 2004
Experiments on Statistical Approaches to Compensate for Limited Linguistic Resources
Application of Variable Length N-Gram Vectors to Monolingual and Bilingual Information Retrieval
Integrating New Languages in a Multilingual Search System Based on a Deep Linguistic Analysis
IR-n r2: Using Normalized Passages
Using COTS Search Engines and Custom Query Strategies at CLEF Report on Thomson Legal and Regulatory Experiments at CLEF-2004
Effective Translation, Tokenization and Combination for Cross-Lingual Retrieval
Two-Stage Refinement of Transitive Query Translation with English
Disambiguation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval: An Experiment at CLEF 2004
Dictionary-Based Amharic – English Information Retrieval
Dynamic Lexica for Query Translation
SINAI at CLEF 2004: Using Machine Translation Resources with a Mixed 2-Step RSV Merging Algorithm
Mono- and Crosslingual Retrieval Experiments at the University of Hildesheim
University of Chicago at CLEF2004: Cross-Language Text and Spoken Document Retrieval
UB at CLEF2004: Cross Language Information Retrieval Using Statistical Language Models
MIRACLE’s Hybrid Approach to Bilingual and Monolingual Information Retrieval
Searching a Russian Document Collection Using English, Chinese and Japanese Queries
Dublin City University at CLEF 2004: Experiments in Monolingual, Bilingual and Multilingual Retrieval
Monolingual Experiments
Finnish, Portuguese and Russian Retrieval with Hummingbird SearchServerTM at CLEF 2004
Data Fusion for Effective European Monolingual Information Retrieval The XLDB Group at CLEF 2004
The University of Glasgow at CLEF 2004: French Monolingual
Information Retrieval with Terrier

Part II. Domain-Specific Document Retrieval
The Domain-Specific Track in CLEF 2004: Overview of the Results and Remarks on the Assessment Process
University of Hagen at CLEF 2004: Indexing and Translating Concepts for the GIRT Task
IRIT at CLEF 2004: The English GIRT Task
Ricoh at CLEF 2004
GIRT and the Use of Subject Metadata for Retrieval

Part III. Interactive Cross-Language Information Retrieval
iCLEF 2004 Track Overview: Pilot Experiments in Interactive Cross-Language Question Answering
Interactive Cross-Language Question Answering: Searching Passages Versus Searching Documents
Improving Interaction with the User in Cross-Language Question Answering Through Relevant Domains and Syntactic Semantic Patterns
Cooperation, Bookmarking, and Thesaurus in Interactive Bilingual Question Answering
Summarization Design for Interactive Cross-Language Question Answering
Interactive and Bilingual Question Answering Using Term Suggestion and Passage Retrieval

Part IV. Multiple Language Question Answering
Overview of the CLEF 2004 Multilingual Question Answering Track
A Question Answering System for French
Cross-Language French-English Question Answering Using the DLT
System at CLEF 2004
Experiments on Robust NL Question Interpretation and Multi-layered
Document Annotation for a Cross-Language Question/Answering System
Making Stone Soup: Evaluating a Recall-Oriented Multi-stream Question Answering System for Dutch
The DIOGENE Question Answering System at CLEF-2004
Cross-Lingual Question Answering Using Off-the-Shelf Machine Translation
Bulgarian-English Question Answering: Adaptation of Language Resources
Answering French Questions in English by Exploiting Results from Several Sources of Information
Finnish as Source Language in Bilingual Question Answering
miraQA: Experiments with Learning Answer Context Patterns from the Web
Question Answering for Spanish Supported by Lexical Context Annotation
Question
First Evaluation of Esfinge – A Question Answering System for Portuguese
University of ´Evora in QA@CLEF-2004
COLE Experiments at QA@CLEF 2004 Spanish Monolingual Track
Does English Help Question Answering in Spanish?
The TALP-QA System for Spanish at CLEF 2004: Structural and Hierarchical Relaxing of Semantic Constraints
ILC-UniPI Italian QA
Question Answering Pilot Task at CLEF 2004
Evaluation of Complex Temporal Questions in CLEF-QA

Part V. Cross-Language Retrieval in Image Collections
The CLEF 2004 Cross-Language Image Retrieval Track
Caption and Query Translation for Cross-Language Image Retrieval
Pattern-Based Image Retrieval with Constraints and Preferences on ImageCLEF 2004
How to Visually Retrieve Images from the St. Andrews Collection Using GIFT
UNED at ImageCLEF 2004: Detecting Named Entities and Noun Phrases for Automatic Query Expansion and Structuring
Dublin City University at CLEF 2004: Experiments with the ImageCLEF St. Andrew’s Collection
From Text to Image: Generating Visual Query for Image Retrieval
Toward Cross-Language and Cross-Media Image Retrieval
FIRE – Flexible Image Retrieval Engine: ImageCLEF 2004 Evaluation
MIRACLE Approach to ImageCLEF 2004: Merging Textual and Content-Based Image Retrieval
Cross-Media Feedback Strategies: Merging Text and Image Information to Improve Image Retrieval
ImageCLEF 2004: Combining Image and Multi-lingual Search for Medical Image Retrieval
Multi-modal Information Retrieval Using FINT
Medical Image Retrieval Using Texture, Locality and Colour SMIRE: Similar Medical Image Retrieval Engine
A Probabilistic Approach to Medical Image Retrieval
UB at CLEF2004 Cross Language Medical Image Retrieval
Content-Based Queries on the CasImage Database Within the IRMA Framework
Comparison and Combination of Textual and Visual Features for Interactive Cross-Language Image Retrieval
MSU at ImageCLEF: Cross Language and Interactive Image Retrieval

Part VI. Cross-Language Spoken Document Retrieval
CLEF 2004 Cross-Language Spoken Document Retrieval Track

Part VII. Issues in CLIR and in Evaluation
The Key to the First CLEF with Portuguese: Topics, Questions and Answers in CHAVE
How Do Named Entities Contribute to Retrieval Effectiveness?
Author Index