Arabic Information Retrieval at UMass in TREC-10.

IntroductionThe University of Massachusetts took on the TREC10 cross-language track with no prior experience withArabic, and no Arabic speakers among any of our researchers or students. We intended to implementsome standard approaches, and to extend a language modeling approach to handle co-occurrences. Giventhe lack of resources -- training data, electronic bilingual dictionaries, and stemmers, and our unfamiliaritywith Arabic, we had our hands full carrying out some standard approaches...