%0 Report %D 1998 %T A Comparative Study of Knowledge-Based Approaches for Cross-Language %A Oard, Douglas %A Dorr, Bonnie J %A Hackett,P. %A Katsova,M. %X Cross-language retrieval systems seek to use queries in one natural language to guide theretrieval 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 util- ity of two sources of manually encoded translation knowledge, bilingual dictionaries and translation lexicons, for cross-language retrieval. We have implemented six query trans- lation 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 transla- tion 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 some- what 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. %I Instititue for Advanced Computer Studies, Univ of Maryland, College Park %8 1998/// %G eng