A Comparative Study of Knowledge-Based Approaches for Cross-Language Information Retrieval

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Date
1998-10-15Author
Oard, Douglas W.
Dorr, Bonnie J.
Hackett, Paul G.
Katsova, Maria
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Show full item recordAbstract
Cross-language retrieval systems seek to use
queries in one natural language to guide the retrieval of documents
that might be written in another. Acquisition and representation of
translation knowledge plays a central role in this process. This
paper explores the utility of two sources of manually encoded
translation knowledge, bilingual dictionaries and translation
lexicons, for cross-language retrieval. We have implemented six query
translation techniques that use bilingual dictionaries, one based on
lexical-semantic analysis, and one based on direct use of the
translation output from an existing machine translation system; these
are compared with a document translation technique that uses output
from the same existing translation system. Average precision measures
on portions of the TREC collection suggest that arbitrarily selecting
a single translation from a bilingual dictionary is typically no less
effective than using every translation in the dictionary, that query
translation using an existing machine translation system can achieve
somewhat better effectiveness than simple dictionary-based techniques,
and that performing document translation rather than query translation
may result in further improvements in retrieval effectiveness under
some conditions.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-98-27)