Cross language information retrieval in Twenty One Using one some or all possible translations

This paper gives an overview of the tools and methods for Cross Language Information Re trieval CLIR that were developed within the Twenty One project The tools and methods are evaluated with the TREC CLIR task document collection using Dutch queries on the English doc ument base The main issue addressed here is an evaluation of two approaches to disambiguation The underlying question is whether a lot of e ort should be put in nding the correct translation for each query term before searching or whether searching with more than one possible transla tion leads to better results The experimental study suggests that in terms of average preci sion searching with ambiguities leads to better retrieval performance than searching with disam biguated queries