A Simple Approach to the Spanish-English Bilingual Retrieval Task

This paper describes our participation in the CLEF bilingual retrieval task (formulating queries in Spanish to retrieve documents in English), using an information retrieval (IR) system based on the vector model. Our aim was to use a simple approach to solve the problem, without expecting to obtain great results, especially owing to the short time available. The queries formulated in Spanish were translated to English by a commercial machine translation system. The translations were filtered to eliminate stop words, and then the remaining terms were stemmed using a standard stemmer. Results were poorer than those obtained through monolingual retrieval with original English queries, the difference being slightly over 15%.