Improving query translation in English-Korean cross-language information retrieval

Abstract

Query translation is a viable method for cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), but it suffers from translation ambiguities caused by multiple translations of individual query terms. Previous research has employed various methods for disambiguation, including the method of selecting an individual target query term from multiple candidates by comparing their statistical associations with the candidate translations of other query terms. This paper proposes a new method where we examine all combinations of target query term translations corresponding to the source query terms, instead of looking at the candidates for each query term and selecting the best one at a time. The goodness value for a combination of target query terms is computed based on the association value between each pair of the terms in the combination. We tested our method using the NTCIR-3 English-Korean CLIR test collection. The results show some improvements regardless of the association measures we used. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.