Needless to say, quality and coverage of language resources for translation significantly affect search performance
of CLIR. Specifically, in the case of searches between two unrelated languages in which cognate
matching has almost no effect, e.g., Japanese and German, poor lexical coverage of the bilingual dictionary
or term list to be used could be a fatal factor leading to low performance because there is almost no means
to deal with untranslatable terms. Actually, McNamee and Mayfield (2002a) experimentally confirmed a
conjecture that retrieval performance drops with decreased lexical coverage when using the CLEF test
collection.