Initial observations on query based sampling in distributed CLIR

Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) enables people to search information written in different languages from their query languages. Information can be retrieved either from a single cross lingual collection or from a variety of distributed cross lingual sources. This paper presents initial results exploring the effectiveness of distributed CLIR using query-based sampling techniques, which to the best of our knowledge has not been investigated before. In distributed retrieval with multiple databases, query-based sampling provides a simple and effective way for acquiring accurate resource descriptions which helps to select which databases to search. Observations from our initial experiments show that the negative impact of query-based sampling on cross language search may not be as great as it is on monolingual retrieval.