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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>The University of Amsterdam at CLEF 2002</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Christof Monz</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Jaap Kamps</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Language &amp; Inference Technology Group, University of Amsterdam Nieuwe Achtergracht 166</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>1018 WV Amsterdam</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="NL">The Netherlands</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Maarten de Rijke</institution>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>This paper describes the official runs of our team for CLEF 2002. We took part in the monolingual tasks for each of the seven non-English languages for which CLEF provides document collections (Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish). We also conducted our first experiments for the bilingual task (English to Dutch, and English to German), and took part in the GIRT and Amaryllis tasks. Finally, we experimented with the combination of runs.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>Introduction</title>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>System Description</title>
      <p>All submitted runs used FlexIR, an information retrieval system developed by the first author. The main
goal underlying FlexIR’s design is to facilitate flexible experimentation with a wide variety of retrieval
components and techniques. FlexIR is implemented in Perl; as it is built around the standard UNIX pipeline
architecture, and supports many types of preprocessing, scoring, indexing, and retrieval tools, which proved
to be a major asset for the wide variety of tasks in which we took part this year.
2.1</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Approach</title>
      <p>
        The retrieval model underlying FlexIR is the standard vector space model. All our official mono- and
bilingual runs for CLEF 2002 used the Lnu.ltc weighting scheme [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] to compute the similarity between a
query and a document. For the experiments on which we report in this note, we fixed slope at either 0.1 or
0.2; the pivot was set to the average number of unique words per document.
2.2
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Morphological Normalization</title>
      <p>
        Previous retrieval experiments [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ] in English have not demonstrated that morphological normalization such
as rule-based stemming [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ] or lexical stemming [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ] consistently yields significant improvements. As
to the effect of stemming on retrieval performance for languages that are morphologically richer than
English, such as Dutch, German, or Italian, in our experiments for CLEF 2001 we consistently found that
morphological normalization does improve retrieval effectiveness [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        Stemming/Lemmatizing. For this year’s monolingual experiments the aim was to improve our existing
morphological analysis for languages that we had dealt with before (i.e, Dutch, German, and Italian), and
to extend it to languages that we had not dealt with before (i.e., Finnish, French, Spanish, and Swedish).
Where available we tried to use a lexical-based stemmer, or lemmatizer: for French, German, and Italian
we used lemmatizers that are part of TreeTagger [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ]. For Dutch we used a Porter stemmer developed
within the Uplift project [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ]; for Spanish we also used a version of Porter’s stemmer [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ]. We did not have
access to (linguistically informed) morphological normalization tools for Finnish or Swedish.
      </p>
      <p>For the GIRT and Amaryllis task, we used TreeTagger for processing the main text. The keywords,
i.e., GIRT’s controlled-terms and Amaryllis’ controlled vocabulary, were indexed as given, indexing the
keywords or keyword-phrases as a single token.</p>
      <p>
        Compound splitting. For Dutch and German, we applied a compound splitter to analyze complex words,
such as, Autobahnraststa¨tte (English: highway restaurant), Menschenrechte (English: human rights),
Friedensvertrag (English: peace agreement), etc. In addition to these noun-noun compounds, there are several
other forms of compounding, including verb-noun (e.g., German: Tankstelle, English: gas station),
verbverb (e.g., German: spazierengehen, English: taking a walk), noun-adjective (e.g., German: arbeitslos,
English: unemployed), adjective-verb (e.g., German: sicherstellen, English: to secure); etc., see [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ] for
a more detailed overview. In last year’s participation we focused on noun-noun compound splitting, but
this year we tried to cover the other forms for German as well. This resulted in a much larger compound
dictionary for German. Whereas last year’s dictionary contained 108,489 entries, it grew up to 772,667 for
this year’s participation. An entry in the compound dictionary consists of a complex word and its parts,
where each part is lemmatized. See [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        ] for further details on the actual process of compound splitting.
      </p>
      <p>
        For retrieval purposes, each document in the collection is analyzed and if a compound is identified,
both the compound and all of its parts all of its parts are added to the document. Compounds occurring in
a query are analyzed in a similar way: the parts are simply added to the query. Since we expand both the
documents and the queries with compound parts, there is no need for compound formation [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ].
Ngrams. To obtain a zero-knowledge language independent approach to morphological normalization,
we implemented an ngram-based method in addition to a linguistically informed methods.
      </p>
      <p>Avg. word length
Ngram length</p>
      <p>For each of the seven non-English languages in the monolingual task we determined the average word
length, and set the ngram-length to be 1 less than the average word length, except for Finnish, where we
set the ngram-length to be 2 less than the average word length; see Table 1 for the details. For each word
we stored both the word itself and all possible ngrams that can be obtained from it without crossing word
boundaries. For instance, the Dutch version of Topic 108 contains the phrase maatschappelijke gevolgen
(English: societal consequences); using ngrams of length 5, this becomes:
maatschappelijke maats aatsc atsch tscha schap chapp happe appel ppeli pelij elijk lijke
gevolgen gevol evolg volge olgen
2.3</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>Blind Feedback</title>
      <p>
        Blind feedback was applied to expand the original query with related terms. Term weights were recomputed
by using the standard Rocchio method [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ], where we considered the top 10 documents to be relevant and
the bottom 500 documents to be non-relevant. We allowed at most 20 terms to be added to the original
query. For Dutch and German, the added words are also decompounded, and the complex words and their
parts are added to the query.
      </p>
      <p>The text runs for the GIRT and Amaryllis tasks used blind feedback, while it was switched off for
the keyword runs. To aid comparison with the monolingual runs, the same feedback settings were used.
There is a remarkable difference in the effect of feedback: virtually no words are added for the GIRT and
Amaryllis tasks.
2.4</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>Combined Runs</title>
      <p>In addition to our morphological interests we also wanted to experiment with combinations of (what we
believed to be) different kinds runs of runs in an attempt to determine their impact on retrieval effectiveness.
More specifically, for each of the languages for which we had access to language specific morphological
normalization tools (i.e., stemmers or lemmatizers), we created a base run using those tools. In addition,
we used ngrams in the manner described above to create a second base run. We then combined these two
base runs in the following manner. First, we normalized the retrieval status values (RSVs), since different
runs may have radically different RSVs. For each run we re-ranked these values in [0:5; 1:0] using:
RSVi0 = 0:5 + 0:5</p>
      <sec id="sec-6-1">
        <title>RSVi</title>
        <p>
          maxi
mini
mini
and assigned all documents not occurring in the top 1000, the value 0:5; this is a variation of the Min Max
Norm considered in [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
          ]. Next, we assigned new weights to the documents using a linear interpolation
factor λ representing the relative weight of a run:
        </p>
        <p>
          RSVnew = λ RSV1 + (1
λ) RSV2:
For λ = 0:5 this is similar to the simple (but effective) summation function used by Fox and Shaw [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ], and
later by Belkin et al. [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
          ] and Lee [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12 ref13">12, 13</xref>
          ]. The interpolation factors λ were obtained from experiments on
the CLEF 2000 and 2001 data sets (whenever available).
        </p>
        <p>For the GIRT and Amaryllis task, we created alternative base runs based on the usage of the keywords
in the collection, and combined these with the text-based runs.
3</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>Runs</title>
      <p>We submitted a total of 27 runs: 10 for the monolingual task, 7 for the bilingual task, and 5 each for the
GIRT and Amaryllis tasks. Below we discuss our runs in some detail.</p>
      <p>Run
UAmsC02DuDuNGiMO
UAmsC02DuDuNGram
UAmsC02FiFiNGram
UAmsC02FrFrNGiMO
UAmsC02GeGeLC2F
UAmsC02GeGeNGiMO
UAmsC02GeGeNGram
UAmsC02ItItNGiMO
UAmsC02SpSpNGiSt
UAmsC02SwSwNGram</p>
      <sec id="sec-7-1">
        <title>Type</title>
        <p>Ngram/Morphological
Ngram
Ngram
Ngram/Morphological
Morphological
Ngram/Morphological
Ngram
Ngram/Morphological
Ngram/Morphological
Ngram</p>
        <p>Both topics and documents were stopped. First of all, for each language we used a stop phrase list
containing phrases such as ‘Find documents that discuss . . . ’; stop phrases were automatically removed from
the topics. We then stopped both topics and documents using the same stop word list. We determined the
400 most frequent words, then removed from this list content words that we felt might be important despite
their high frequency. For instance, in most of the document collections terms such as ‘Europe’ and ‘dollar’
occur with high frequency. We did not use a stop ngram list, but in our ngram runs we first used a stop
word list, and then ngram-ed the topics and documents. For the ngram runs we did not replace diacritic
letters by their non-diacritic counterparts, for the morphological runs we did.
3.2</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>The Bilingual Task</title>
      <p>We submitted a total of 7 bilingual runs, using English as the topic language, and Dutch and German as
document languages.</p>
      <p>Run
UAmsC02EnDuMorph
UAmsC02EnDuNGiMO
UAmsC02EnDuNGram
UAmsC02EnGeLC2F
UAmsC02EnGeMOiMO
UAmsC02EnGeNGiMO
UAmsC02EnGeNGram</p>
      <sec id="sec-8-1">
        <title>Topics</title>
        <p>English
English
English
English
English
English
English</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-8-2">
        <title>Documents</title>
        <p>Dutch
Dutch
Dutch
German
German
German
German</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-8-3">
        <title>Type</title>
        <p>Morphological
Ngram/Morphological
Ngram
Morphological 1
Morphological/Morphological 2
Ngram/Morphological 1
Ngram</p>
        <p>Factor</p>
        <p>–
0.71
–
–
0.50
0.285
–</p>
        <p>
          For the bilingual runs, we followed a dictionary-based approach. The translations of the words and phrases
of the topic are simply added to the query in an unstructured way; see [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
          ] for a more elaborated way of
query formulation. The original queries are translated to Dutch using the Ergane dictionary [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
          ], and to
German using the Ding dictionary [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
          ], version 1.1. The Ergane dictionary contains 15,103 English head
words and 45,068 translation pairs in total. The Ding dictionary contains 103,041 English head words and
145,255 translation pairs in total.
        </p>
        <p>Since the Ergane dictionary is rather small, we used a pattern-based approach to extend the translation
dictionary with additional translation pairs. Table 4 shows some of the patterns. Notice that the vast
majority of the words that match one or more of these patterns are words that are derived from Latin. If
an English word was not in the Ergane dictionary each matching pattern was applied and all translations
were added to the query. Of course, this rather ad-hoc approach to translation is far from perfect. For
instance, privatization will be translated as privatisering (correct), by applying pattern (5), and privatisatie
(incorrect), by applying pattern (6). Although this is unacceptable for machine translation applications,
those erroneous translations have virtually no impact on retrieval effectiveness, because almost all of them
are non-existing words that do not occur in the inverted index anyway.</p>
        <p>Just like our Dutch and German monolingual runs, we prepared morphological and ngram-based runs,
and combined these in order to improve effectiveness; see Table 3 for the details.
3.3</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-9">
      <title>The GIRT and Amaryllis Tasks</title>
      <p>
        As pointed out in Section 1, our strategy for the GIRT and Amaryllis tasks in CLEF 2002 was to
compute the similarity of keywords based on their occurrence in the collection, and investigate whether the
resulting keyword space can be used to improve retrieval effectiveness. We assumed that keywords that
are frequently assigned to the same documents, will have similar meaning. We determined the number
of occurrence of keywords and of co-occurrences of pairs of keywords used in the collection, and used
these to define a distance metric. Specifically, we used the Jaccard similarity coefficient on the log of
(co)occurrences, and used 1 minus the Jaccard score as a distance metric [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ]. For creating manageable
size vectors for each of the keywords, we reduced the matrix using metric multi-dimensional scaling
techniques [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ]. For all calculations we used the best approximation of the distance matrix on 10 dimensions.
This resulted in a 10-dimensional vector for each of the 6745 keywords occurring in the GIRT collection.
The Amaryllis collection uses a much richer set of 125360 keywords, which we reduced by selecting the
most frequent ones; this resulted in vectors for 10274 keywords occurring 25 times in the collection. For
our official CLEF runs we experimented with these keywords spaces for two specific purposes: keyword
recovery and for document re-ranking.
      </p>
      <p>We used the following strategy for determining vectors for the documents and for the topics: we took
the top 10 documents from a base run (not using the keywords). For each of these documents we collected
the keywords, and determined a document vector by taking the mean of the keyword vectors. Next, we
determined a vector for the topic by taking the weighted mean of the vectors for the top 10 documents.
For document re-ranking, we simply re-ranked the documents retrieved in the base run by the distance
between the document and topic vectors. For keyword recovery, we considered the keywords used in the
top 10 document, and selected the ten keywords that are closest to the topics vector. Table 5(a) shows the
keywords recovered for GIRT topic 51.</p>
      <sec id="sec-9-1">
        <title>Selbstbewußtsein familiale Sozialisation Junge Adoleszenz</title>
        <p>Subkultur
Erziehungsstil
soziale Isolation
Marginalita¨t
Bewußtseinsbildung
Puberta¨t
(a) GIRT topic 51
(recovered)
Concentration et toxicite´ des polluants
Me´canisme de formation des polluants
Re´duction de la pollution
Choix du carburant
Re´glage de la combustion
Traitement des gaz d’e´chappement
Le´gislation et re´glementation
(b) Amaryllis topic 1
(monolingual, given)</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-9-2">
        <title>Qualite´ air</title>
        <p>Moteur diesel
Trafic routier urbain
Autobus
Azote oxyde
Exposition professionnelle
Ve´hicule a` moteur
Carburant diesel
Inventaire source pollution
Carburant remplacement
(c) Amaryllis topic 1
(bilingual, recovered)</p>
        <p>For the Amaryllis task, we can compare the provided topic-keywords in the narrative-field (shown in
Table 5(b)), with the topic-keywords resulting from our automatic keyword recovery (shown in Table 5(c)).
The recovered keywords are subsequently used in a keyword-only run.</p>
        <p>For the GIRT task, we submitted three monolingual runs and two bilingual (English to German) runs.
All our GIRT runs use the title and description fields of the topics. The morphological base run mimics the
settings of our monolingual morphological base run for German. Based on the top 10 documents from the
base run, we use the keyword space for recovering keywords for the topics as discussed above. The topic
vector based on the top 10 documents of the base run is also used for re-ranking the documents retrieved
in our base run. Experimentation on topics of CLEF 2000 and CLEF 2001 revealed that the keyword and
re-rank runs perform worse than the base text run, yet a combination of the base run and either a keyword
or a re-rank run helps to improve the performance.</p>
        <p>Our runs for the bilingual GIRT task (English topics) used the translation method of the German
bilingual task (using the ding dictionary) for translation of the title and description fields. For the rest, the
bilingual tasks mimics the monolingual runs. We made a base morphological run, and recovered keywords
for a keyword-only run, and a document re-ranking.</p>
        <p>For the monolingual Amaryllis task, we submitted three monolingual runs and two bilingual (English
to French) runs. Our morphological base run uses the same settings as the monolingual French run. For the
keyword-only run, keywords were taken from the narrative fields of the topics. For the bilingual Amaryllis</p>
        <p>Run
UAmsC02GeGiTT
UAmsC02GeGiTTiKW
UAmsC02GeGiTTiRR
UAmsC02EnGiTTiKW
UAmsC02EnGiTTiRR
UAmsC02FrAmTT
UAmsC02FrAmKW
UAmsC02FrAmTTiKW
UAmsC02EnAmTTiKW
UAmsC02EnAmTTiRR</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-9-3">
        <title>Task</title>
        <p>GIRT
GIRT
GIRT
GIRT
GIRT
Amaryllis
Amaryllis
Amaryllis
Amaryllis
Amaryllis</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-9-4">
        <title>Topics</title>
        <p>German
German
German
English
English
French
French
French
English
English</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-9-5">
        <title>Documents</title>
        <p>German
German
German
German
German
French
French
French
French
French</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-9-6">
        <title>Type</title>
        <p>
          Morphological
Morphological/Keyword
Morphological/Re-rank
Morphological/Keyword
Morphological/Re-rank
Morphological
Keyword
Morphological/Keyword
Morphological/Keyword
Morphological/Re-rank
task, we used Systran [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">20</xref>
          ] to translate the title and description fields of the English topics. We did not use
the provided English keywords, nor the special dictionary provided. We made a morphological base run
(similar to the monolingual task), and collected the keywords from the top 10 documents, which were then
used for determining a document re-ranking and for keyword recovery.
4
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-10">
      <title>Results</title>
      <p>This section summarizes the results of our CLEF 2002 submissions.
4.1</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-11">
      <title>Monolingual Results</title>
      <p>We were somewhat surprised by the low scores of our morphological run for Dutch (0.3673) and of the
ngram run for Italian (0.3672). The former is probably due to the fact that we used a reasonably crude
stemmer, instead of a proper lemmatizer; the latter may be due to the fact that we did not replace diacritic
characters by the corresponding non-diacritic letters.
where Rcommon (Ncommon) is the number of common relevant (non-relevant) documents, and Ri (Ni) is
the number of relevant (non-relevant) documents in runi. (A document is relevant if, and only if, it receives
relevance score equal to 1 in the qrels provided by CLEF.) Table 8 shows the overlap coefficients for the
base runs used to produce combined runs.</p>
      <p>A few comments are in order. First, for French and Spanish the base runs are of similar (high) quality,
but because the Noverlap coefficient is high, the combinations do not improve all that much. Furthermore,
we conjecture that the reason for the limited gains of the combined runs over the best base runs for Dutch
and Italian is due to the somewhat low quality of one of the base runs for these languages. Finally, the
significant improvement obtained by combining the two German base runs may be explained as follows:
both base runs are high quality runs, their Roverlap coefficient is high, and their Noverlap is fairly low —
under these circumstances, Lee’s rationale predicts that the combined run is of high quality.
4.2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-12">
      <title>Bilingual Results</title>
      <p>After we had received our results from CLEF, it emerged that one of the base runs submitted the for English
to German task (UAmsC02EnGeLC2F) was not the correct one. As a consequence, the combinations in
which this base run was used were also incorrect (UAmsC02EnGeNGiMO and UAmsC02EnGeMOiMO).
The results and figures below have been obtained with the correct version of UAmsC02EnGeLC2F, using
the qrels provided by CLEF.</p>
      <p>To begin with, Table 9 shows our non-interpolated average precision scores for both bilingual sub task:
English to Dutch and English to German.</p>
      <sec id="sec-12-1">
        <title>Morphological 1</title>
        <p>Morphological 2
Ngram
Combined Ngram/Morp. 1
Combined Morph. 1/Morph. 2</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-12-2">
        <title>English to Dutch</title>
        <p>0.2576
–
0.2807
0.2933 (+4.5%)
–</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-12-3">
        <title>English to German</title>
        <p>0.3363
0.3094
0.2614
0.3514 (+4.5%)
0.3451 (+2.6%)</p>
        <p>For English to Dutch, we submitted one morphological run, where both stemming and compound splitting
was applied. For English to German, we created two morphological runs, one with a large decompounding
lexicon (Morphological 1), and one with last year’s settings, i.e., a smaller decompounding lexicon
(Morphological 2). For both target languages we also submitted one n-gram run. In addition, we combined
the n-gram run with the morphological run for both languages, and for German we also combined both
morphological runs.</p>
        <p>Table 10 shows the decrease in effectiveness compared to the best monolingual run for the respective
target language.</p>
        <p>Best monolingual
Best bilingual</p>
        <p>If we consider the decrease in retrieval effectiveness between monolingual and bilingual, we can observe a
significant difference between Dutch and German. It is very likely that this is due to the difference in size
between the translation dictionaries that were used to formulate the target queries: the Dutch translation
dictionary contained 15,103 head words plus translation rules, whereas the German dictionary contained
103,041 head words; see Section 3.</p>
        <p>As with the monolingual runs, we also analyzed the overlap coefficients for base runs that were
combined; see Table 11. The gains in effectiveness of the combination over the best base runs is consistent with
the coefficients, with comparable gains for the ngram/morphological combinations for Dutch and German;
note that both have a fairly low Noverlap coefficient. The two (German) morphological runs share many
non-relevant documents, and as consequence the combination of these two runs is less effective that the
combination of the ngram run with the morphological 1 run.</p>
        <sec id="sec-12-3-1">
          <title>Roverlap Noverlap</title>
          <p>English to Dutch
Ngram/Morphological
0.7737
0.2516</p>
        </sec>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-12-4">
        <title>English to German</title>
        <p>Ngram/Morphological 1
0.7898
0.3588</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-12-5">
        <title>English to German</title>
        <p>Morphological 1/Morphological 2
0.9338
0.5853</p>
        <p>The results for the GIRT tasks are outright disappointing. Our morphological base run fails to life up
to the performance of the corresponding monolingual German runs (average precision 0.1639 for GIRT
versus 0.4476 for German). On our pre-submission experiments on the GIRT topics of CLEF 2000 and
CLEF 2001, we also noticed a drop in performance, but far less dramatic as for the CLEF 2002 run (average
precision around 0.31 for both runs versus 0.1639 this year). Still, the combination of the morphological
run with either the keyword run or re-rank run improves retrieval effectiveness. For the English to German
GIRT task, only the combination of the morphological and re-rank base runs improves compared to the
base runs; this may be due to the extremely low precision at 10 of the bilingual base run (0.1417).</p>
        <p>Our runs for Amaryllis are more in line with the results for the monolingual French task (average
precision 0.2681 for the base run versus 0.4063 for French). The keyword-only run using the provided keywords
even out-performs the morphological base run. The combination of the two runs leads to an impressive
improvement of retrieval effectiveness (+26.7%). The English to French Amaryllis task performs fairly well
compared to the monolingual Amaryllis task. The combination runs of the morphological base run with the
recovered keywords, and of the morphological base run with the re-ranking show significant improvement.</p>
        <p>Figure 3 contains precision-recall plots for the GIRT and Amaryllis tasks. In addition to the scores
for our submitted runs, the figure also plots the scores for the base runs that were used to generate the
combined runs.</p>
        <sec id="sec-12-5-1">
          <title>Roverlap Noverlap</title>
          <p>GIRT (mono)
0.4493
0.1031</p>
        </sec>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-12-6">
        <title>GIRT (bi)</title>
        <p>0.2984
0.0756</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-12-7">
        <title>Amaryllis (mono)</title>
        <p>0.6586
0.1236</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-12-8">
        <title>Amaryllis (bi)</title>
        <p>0.6506
0.1301</p>
        <p>As above, we analyzed the overlap coefficients for base runs that were combined; see Table 13. As
expected, gains in effectiveness are due to a high Roverlap coefficient combined with a relatively low
Noverlap coefficient. This gives some rationale for why the combination of a baserun with a much lower
quality run can improve retrieval effectiveness. It is interesting to note that the coefficients for the
combined monolingual Amaryllis (using the provided keywords) are similar to those of the bilingual (using the
recovered keywords).
5</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-13">
      <title>Conclusions</title>
      <p>The experiments on which we report in this note indicate a number of things. First, morphological
normalization does improve retrieval effectiveness significantly, especially for languages such as Dutch and
Morphological
Keyword
Rerank
Morph./Keyword
Morph./Rerank
Morphological
Keyword
Morph./Keyword</p>
      <p>German, that have a more complex morphology than English. We also showed that ngram-based retrieval
can be a viable option in the absence of linguistic resources to support deep morphological normalization.
Furthermore, combining runs provides a method that can consistently improve base runs, even high quality
base runs; moreover, the interpolation factors required for the best gain in performance seem to be fairly
robust across topics. Finally, our results for the bilingual task indicate that simple word/phrase translation,
where all possible translations are used to formulate the target query in an unstructured way, leads to a
significant decrease in effectiveness, when compared to the respective monolingual runs. Therefore, we
are planning to investigate more restrictive ways of formulating target queries.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-14">
      <title>Acknowledgments</title>
      <p>We want to thank Willem van Hage and Vera Hollink for their technical support, and Maarten Marx for
useful discussions.</p>
      <p>Jaap Kamps was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO, grant #
400-20-036). Christof Monz was supported by the Physical Sciences Council with financial support from
the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), project 612-13-001. Maarten de Rijke was
supported by grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), under project
numbers 612-13-001, 365-20-005, 612.069.006, 612.000.106, 220-80-001, and 612.000.207.</p>
    </sec>
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