Domain-Specific Russian Retrieval: A Baseline Approach

Berkeley group 2 chose to perform some very straightforward experiments in retrieval of Russian documents using queries derived from topics in all three languages. Thus we performed two runs with monolingual Russian retrieval and one cross-lingual run each with German topics and English topics. Query translation was done using the online PROMT translator (www.translate.ru). Monolingual results were substantially better than the overall median performance of all Russian runs, and crosslanguage results were encouraging with German Russian retrieval doing substantially better than English Russian.