A Comparative Study of Query and Document Translation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Cross language retrieval systems use queries in one natural language to guide retrieval of documents that might be written in an other Acquisition and representation of translation knowledge plays a central role in this process This paper explores the utility of two sources of translation knowledge for cross language retrieval We have imple mented six query translation techniques that use bilingual term lists and one based on direct use of the translation output from an exist ing machine translation system these are compared with a document translation technique that uses output from the same machine transla tion system Average precision measures on a TREC collection suggest that arbitrarily selecting a single dictionary translation is typically no less e ective than using every translation in the dictionary that query translation using a machine translation system can achieve somewhat better e ectiveness than simpler techniques and that document transla tion may result in further improvements in retrieval e ectiveness under some conditions