Evaluating Resources for Query Translation in Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Our goal is to evaluate the utility of a lexical resource containing Lexical Conceptual Structures LCS for use in cross language information retrieval Our evaluation makes use of a combination of techniques from interlingual machine translation Dorr with conventional information retrieval techniques Oard OardandDorr Given a query in one language we transform the query into the corresponding terms in a second language We evaluate this approach by comparing the resulting retrieval effectiveness with two translation based techniques as well as two techniques for determining the lower and upper bound The main innovation of this work is that it provides a principled framework for controlling translation ambiguity in cross language information retrieval applications Our focus is on the construction of disambiguated target language queries by using verb based entries in our lexicon to construct Lexical Conceptual Structures LCS We view our approach as a crucial step toward the evaluation of the utility of our LCS basedmultilingual lexicon Inaddition this work provides abasis formeasuring the extentto which disambiguation can enhance cross language information retrieval effectiveness