Supporting Multilingual Information Retrieval in Web Applications: An English-Chinese Web Portal Experiment

Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) and multilingual information retrieval (MLIR) techniques have been widely studied, but they are not often applied to and evaluated for Web applications. In this paper, we present our research in developing and evaluating a multilingual English-Chinese Web portal in the business domain. A dictionary-based approach has been adopted that combines phrasal translation, co-occurrence analysis, and preand post-translation query expansion. The approach was evaluated by domain experts and the results showed that co-occurrence-based phrasal translation achieved a 74.6% improvement in precision when compared with simple word-by-word translation.