The University of Maryland team participated in four aspects of TREC-8: the ad hoc retrieval task, the main task in the cross-language retrieval (CLIR) track, the question answering track, and the routing task in the filtering track. The CLIR method was based on Pirkola's method for Dictionary-based Query Translation, using freely available dictionaries. Broad-coverage parsing and rule-based matching was used for question answering. Routing was performed using Latent Semantic Indexing in profile space.