Noun phrases as building blocks for cross-language Search Assistance

This paper presents a Foreign-Language Search Assistant that uses noun phrases as fundamental units for document translation and query formulation, translation and refinement. The system (a) supports the foreign-language document selection task providing a cross-language indicative summary based on noun phrase translations, and (b) supports query formulation and refinement using the information displayed in the cross-language document summaries. Our results challenge two implicit assumptions in most of cross-language Information Retrieval research: first, that once documents in the target language are found, Machine Translation is the optimal way of informing the user about their contents; and second, that in an interactive setting the optimal way of formulating and refining the query is helping the user to choose appropriate translations for the query terms. 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.