Bilingual tests with Swedish, Finnish and German queries: dealing with morphology, compound words and query structure

We used a dictionary-based approach, and performed tests in the bilingual track with three language pairs, i.e., Swedish – English (Swe-Eng), Finnish – English (Fin-Eng), and German – English (Ger-Eng). All the source languages are compound languages, i.e., languages rich in compound words. A compound word refers to a multi-word expression where the component words are written together. Our main efforts were to develop techniques for the processing of compounds, to study different types of compound languages, and to study the effects query structuring in different languages. We designed and implemented a method for automated query construction in FIN ⎜SWE ⎜GER-> ENG. The goal of this process is to extract automatically topical information from sentences written in one of the source languages (FIN, SWE, GER) and to create a target language (ENG) query. The resulting query may be either structured or unstructured