Should we translate the documents or the queries in cross-language information retrieval?
ACL '99 Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Computational Linguistics
Technical issues of cross-language information retrieval: a review
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal - Special issue: Cross-language information retrieval
Translation techniques in cross-language information retrieval
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
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This paper reports experimental results for cross-language infor-mation retrieval (CLIR) from German to French, in which a hybrid approach to query and document translation was attempted, i.e., combining the results of query translation (German to French) and of document translation (French to German). In order to reduce the complexity of computation when translating a large amount of texts, we performed pseudo-translation, i.e., a simple replacement of terms by a bilingual dictionary (for query translation, a machine translation system was used). In particular, since English was used as an intermediary language for both translation directions between German and French, English translations at the middle stage were employed as document representations in order to reduce the number of translation steps. By omitting a translation step (English to German), the performance was improved. Unfortunately, our hybrid approach did not show better performance than a simple query translation. This may be due to the low performance of document translation, which was carried out by a simple replacement of terms using a bilingual dictionary with no term disambiguation.