Comparing syntactic-semantic patterns and passages in interactive cross language information access (iCLEF at University of Alicante)

We present the results of the interactive CLEF experiment at the University of Alicante. Our aim was to compare two interactive approaches: one based on passages (presented at iCLEF 2002), and a new interactive approach based on syntactic-semantic patterns. These patterns are composed by the main verb of a sentence plus its arguments, and are extracted automatically from the passages. Such patterns show only the basic information of each sentence. The objective was to investigate which of these approaches is faster and most useful in the selection of relevant documents by the user in a language different than that of the query (and of the user). The results show that both approaches are useful, but that the approach based on syntactic-semantic patterns is, in the majority of cases, faster. With these approaches it is possible to avoid the use of Machine Translation systems and the problems caused by their adoption in Interactive Cross-Language Information Access tasks.