Interactive question answering: Is Cross-Language harder than monolingual searching?

Is Cross-Language answer finding harder than Monolingual answer finding for users? In this paper we provide initial quantitative and qualitative evidence to answer this question.In our study, which involves 16 users searching questions under four different system conditions, we find that interactive cross-language answer finding is not substantially harder (in terms of accuracy) than its monolingual counterpart, using general purpose Machine Translation systems and standard Information Retrieval machinery, although it takes more time. We have also seen that users need more context to provide accurate answers (full documents) than what is usually considered by systems (paragraphs or passages).Finally, we also discuss the limitations of standard evaluation methodologies for interactive Information Retrieval experiments in the case of cross-language question answering.