Within the context of BOLT's overarching goal of improving machine translation capabilities in informal data genres, the BOLT IR task focused on advancing the state of the art of information retrieval over these genres (DARPA, 2011).
bOLT IR seeks to support development of systems which could: 1) take as input a natural language English query sentence, 2) return relevant responses to that query from a large corpus of informal documents in the three bOLT languages (Arabic, Chinese, and English), and 3) translate relevant responses into English where necessary (i.e.