The Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) approach has previously been shown to be effective in recruiting and retaining students, particularly under-represented students, in undergraduate introductory CS courses. In PLTL, small groups of students are led by an undergraduate peer and work together to solve problems related to CS. At Columbia University, the Columbia Emerging Scholars Program has used PLTL in an effort to increase enrollment in CS courses beyond the introductory level, and to increase the number of students who select Computer Science as their major, by demonstrating that CS is necessarily a collaborative activity that focuses more on problem solving and algorithmic thinking than on programming. Over the past six semesters, over 80 students have completed the program, and preliminary results indicate that this program has had a positive effect on increasing participation in the major.

We consider the problem of translingual information retrieval, where monolingual searchers issue queries in a different language than the document language(s) and the results must be returned in the language they know, the query language. We present a framework for translingual IR that integrates document translation and query translation into the retrieval model. The corpus is represented as an aligned, jointly indexed "pseudo-parallel" corpus, where each document contains the text of the document along with its translation into the query language. The queries are formulated as multilingual structured queries, where each query term and its translations into the document language(s) are treated as synonym sets. This model leverages simultaneous search in multiple languages against jointly indexed documents to improve the accuracy of results over search using document translation or query translation alone. For query translation, we compared a statistical machine translation (SMT) approach to a dictionary-based approach. We found that using a Wikipedia-derived dictionary for named entities combined with an SMT-based dictionary worked better than SMT alone. Simultaneous multilingual search also has other important features suited to translingual search, since it can provide an indication of poor document translation when a match with the source document is found. We show how close integration of CLIR and SMT allows us to improve result translation in addition to IR results.