Many English words appear in Asian language texts, especially in the
news reports and technical documents. Although a foreign term and its
counterpart in English refer to the same concept, they are erroneously treated as
independent index units in traditional monolingual IR. For CLIR, one of the
major hindrances to achieving retrieval performance at the level of monolingual
information retrieval is the translation of terms in queries, which are not found
in a bilingual dictionary. This paper describes the degree to which these
problems arise in Korean Information Retrieval and suggests a novel approach
to solve it. Experimental results based on NTCIR and KT-Set test collections
show that the high translation precision of our approach greatly improves the IR
performance.