Keyword Translation from English to Chinese for Multilingual QA

The Keyword Translator is a part of the Question Analyzer module in the JAVELIN Question-Answering system; it translates the keywords that are used to query documents and extract answers. Much work has been done in the area of query translation for CLIR or MLIR, yet most have focused on methods using hard-to-obtain and domain-specific resources, with evaluation often based on retrieval performance rather than translation correctness. In this paper we describe methods combining easily accessible, general-purpose MT systems to improve keyword translation correctness. We also describe methods that utilize the question sentence available to a question-answering system to improve translation correctness. We will show that using multiple MT systems and the question sentence to translate keywords from English to Mandarin Chinese can improve keyword translation correctness.