Comparing User-assisted and Automatic Query Translation

View/ Open
Date
2003-02-27Author
He, Daqing
Wang, Jianqiang
Oard, Douglas W.
Nossal, Michael
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
For the 2002 Cross-Language Evaluation Forum Interactive Track, the
University of Maryland team focused on query formulation and
reformulation. Twelve people performed a total of forty eight
searches in the German document collection using English queries. Half
of the searches were with user-assisted query translation, and half with
fully automatic query translation. For the user-assisted query
translation condition, participants were provided two types of cues
about the meaning of each translation: a list of other terms with the
same translation (potential synonyms), and a sentence in which the
word was used in a translation-appropriate context. Four searchers
performed the official iCLEF task, the other eight searched a smaller
collection. Searchers performing the official task were able to make
more accurate relevance judgments with user-assisted query translation
for three of the four topics. We observed that the number of query
iterations seems to vary systematically with topic, system, and
collection, and we are analyzing query content and ranked retrieval
measures to obtain further insight into these variations in search
behavior.
UMIACS-TR-2003-23
LAMP-TR-098
HCIL-TR-2003-07