A Novel Implementation of the FITE-TRT Translation Method

Cross-language Information Retrieval requires good methods for translating cross-lingual spelling variants which are not covered by the available dictionary resources. FITE-TRT is an established method employing frequency-based identification of translation equivalents received from transformation rule based translation. This study further develops and evaluates the FITE-TRT method. The paper contributes on four areas. First, an efficient implementation for the FITE-TRT method is discussed. Secondly, a novel iterative FITE-TRT translation approach is developed in order to further improve the effectiveness of the method. Thirdly, the effectiveness of FITETRT is assessed in three classes of source-target word similarity. FITE-TRT was found to be very strong in the class of the most similar source and target words and only becomes unsuccessful when the words were dissimilar. Fourthly, in comparison to n-gram and s-gram matching methods, FITE-TRT is shown consistently stronger. All in all, FITE-TRT clearly outperforms the fuzzy string matching methods under comparable conditions. Therefore it is the method of choice for the identification of translation equivalents of crosslingual spelling variants when the requirements for the result quality are high.