UNED at iCLEF 2003: Searching Cross-Language Summaries

The UNED phrase-based cross-language summaries were first introduced at iCLEF 2001 as a translation strategy which permitted faster document selection with roughly the same accuracy than full Machine Translation. For our iCLEF 2003 participation, we tested the validity of our summaries as cross-language indexes for the retrieval stage of the interactive search process. We compared a reference system that performs query translation (and then retrieves target-language documents) with a system that directly retrieves cross-language summaries with the source-language query. The performance of both systems is very similar, confirming that UNED summaries are viable for cross-language indexing. This approach is trivially scalable to more than one target language, opening an interesting path for truly multilingual search assistance.