A multilingual information retrieval method is presented where the user formulates the query in his/her preferred language to retrieve relevant information from a multilingual document collection. This multilingual retrieval method involves mono-language searches as well as merging their resutls. We adopt a corpus based approach where documents of differnet languages are associated if they cover a similar story. The resulting comparable corpus enables two novel techniques we have developed. First, it enables Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) which does not lack vocabulary coverage as we observed in the case of approaches that are based on automatic Machine Translation (MT). Second, aligned documents of this corpus facilitate to merge the resutls of mono- and cross-language searches. Using hte TREC CLIR data, excellent resuts are obtained. In addition, our evaluation of the document alignments gives us new insights about the usefulness of comparable copora.
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