EuroWordNet as a Resource for Cross-language Information Retrieval

One of the aims of EuroWordNet (EWN) was to provide a resource for Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). In this paper we present experiments to test the usefulness of EWN for this purpose via a formal evaluation using the Spanish queries from the TREC6 CLIR test set. All CLIR systems using bilingual dictionaries must find a way of dealing with multiple translations and we employ a word sense disambiguation algorithm for this purpose. Retrieval performance using when the disambiguation algorithm was used was 90% of that recorded using queries which had been disambiguated manually.