Iterative translation disambiguation for cross-language information retrieval

TitleIterative translation disambiguation for cross-language information retrieval
Publication TypeConference Papers
Year of Publication2005
AuthorsMonz C, Dorr BJ
Conference NameProceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Date Published2005///
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number1-59593-034-5
Keywordscross-language retrieval, query formulation, term co-occurrence measures, term weighting, translation disambiguation
Abstract

Finding a proper distribution of translation probabilities is one of the most important factors impacting the effectiveness of a cross-language information retrieval system. In this paper we present a new approach that computes translation probabilities for a given query by using only a bilingual dictionary and a monolingual corpus in the target language. The algorithm combines term association measures with an iterative machine learning approach based on expectation maximization. Our approach considers only pairs of translation candidates and is therefore less sensitive to data-sparseness issues than approaches using higher n-grams. The learned translation probabilities are used as query term weights and integrated into a vector-space retrieval system. Results for English-German cross-lingual retrieval show substantial improvements over a baseline using dictionary lookup without term weighting.

URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1076034.1076123
DOI10.1145/1076034.1076123