Is there Hope for Interlingua methods? A CLIR Comparison Experiment between Interlingua and Query Translation

A comparison of interlingua and query translation is proposed in a particular cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) application which consists on retrieving a book from the collection by using one of its chapters in a different language as a query. The experiments are performed in three languages (English, Chinese and Spanish) and all the possible combinations. It is shown that interlingua is able to outperform the query translation approach in some cross-language tasks. Results are further analysed and it is found that, for this particular task, the quality of translation (in terms of BLEU and PER) is not directly correlated with the query translation performance.