Book Review: Cross-Language Information Retrieval by Jian-Yun Nie

Cross-Language Information Retrieval is a compact book introducing a branch of information retrieval that has gained considerable research interest since the dawn of the WorldWideWeb in the mid 1990s. Information retrieval is generally concerned with the problem of finding documents within a large collection that are relevant to a given input query. Whereas the original formulation of IR assumes that queries and documents are written in the same language, cross-language IR (CLIR) presumes instead that they are written in two different languages. If the collection contains documents in more languages, then we refer to multi-lingual IR (MLIR), which is typically solved with multiple instances of CLIR. Recently, other variations on the theme have been proposed that address non-textual documents, such as image, music, and speech retrieval. An interesting application of CLIR is the retrieval of images that are provided with textual descriptions in any language. Computational linguistics could be interested in CLIR for several reasons. CLIR is mainly about the optimal integration ofmachine translation (MT) and IR, and it presents peculiar and difficult translation issues when short queries are involved, which is the most common case. For such problems, interesting approaches have been developed and refined over time, which mainly build on top of core statistical MT techniques (e.g., word alignment models, translation models) and various lexical resources (e.g., WordNet, dictionaries). In recent years, several books on IR have been published (e.g., Grossman and Frieder 2004; Manning, Raghavan, and Schütze 2008; Büttcher, Clarke, and Cormack 2010), which devoted at most a section or chapter to CLIR. As specific books on CLIR have been limited so far to edited collections of scientific papers (Grefenstette 1998), it was definitely time for the first monograph on the topic. Jian-Yun Nie’s volume is structured as five chapters, which are organized as follows: