Manual Queries and Machine Translation in Cross-Language Retrieval and Interactive Retrieval with Cheshire II at TREC-7

For TREC-7, the Berkeley ad-hoc experiments explored more phrase discovery in topics and documents. We utilized Boolean retrieval combined with probabilistic ranking for 17 topics in ad-hoc manual entry. Our cross-language experiments tested 3 di erent widely available machine translation software packages. For language pairs (e.g. German to French) for which no direct machine translation was available we made use of English as a universal intermediate language. For CLIR we also manually reformulated the English topics before doing machine translation, and this elicited a signi cant performance increase for both quad language retrieval and for English against English and French documents. In our Interactive Track entry eight searchers conducted eight searches each, half on the Cheshire II system and the other half on the Zprise system, for a total of 64 searches. Questionnaires were administered to gather information about basic demographic and searching experience, about each search, about each of the systems, and nally, about the user's perceptions of the systems.