Mining a multilingual association dictionary from Wikipedia for cross-language information retrieval

The Wikipedia is characterized by its dense link structure and a huge amount of articles in different languages, which make it a notable Web corpus for knowledge extraction and mining, in particular for mining the multilingual associations. In this paper, motivated by a psychological theory of word meaning, we propose a graphbased approach to constructing a cross-language association dictionary (CLAD) from Wikipedia, which can be used in a series of cross language accessing and processing applications. In order to evaluate the quality of the mined CLAD, and to demonstrate how the mined CLAD can be used in practice, we explore two different applications of the mined CLAD to the cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). First, we expand cross-language retrieval queries using the mined CLAD; and second, we use it to filter out translation candidates with low translation probabilities. Experimental results on a variety of standard CLIR test collections show that the CLIR retrieval performance can be substantially improved with the above two applications of CLAD.