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Using Query-Relevant Documents Pairs for Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval [*]

David Pinto(1,2), Alfons Juan1, Paolo Rosso1

1Department of Information Systems and Computation,
Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain

2Faculty of Computer Science,
B. Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico

{dpinto, ajuan, prosso}@dsic.upv.es

Abstract:

The world wide web is a natural setting for cross-lingual information retrieval. The European Union is a typical example of a multilingual scenario, where multiple users have to deal with information published in at least 20 languages. Given queries in some source language and a target corpus in another language, the typical approximation consists in translating either the query or the target dataset to the other language. Other approaches use parallel corpora to obtain a statistical dictionary of words among the different languages. In this work, we propose to use a training corpus made up by a set of Query-Relevant Document Pairs (QRDP) in a probabilistic cross-lingual information retrieval approach which is based on the IBM alignment model 1 for statistical machine translation. Our approach has two main advantages over those that use direct translation and parallel corpora: we will not obtain a translation of the query, but a set of associated words which share their meaning in some way and, therefore, the obtained dictionary is, in a broad sense, more semantic than a translation one. Besides, since the queries are supervised, we are working in a more restricted domain than that when using a general parallel corpus (it is well known that in this context results are better than those which are performed in a general context). In order to determine the quality of our experiments, we compared the results with those obtained by a direct translation of the queries with a query translation system, observing promising results.




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Next: Introduction
David Pinto 2007-10-05