Is query translation a distinct task from search

Information Processing and Management, 2008

Interactive Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), a process in which searcher and system collaborate to find documents that satisfy an information need regardless of the language in which those documents are written, calls for designs in which synergies between searcher and system can be leveraged so that the strengths of one can cover weaknesses of the other. This paper describes an approach that employs user-assisted query translation to help searchers better understand the system's operation. Supporting interaction and interface designs are introduced, and results from three user studies are presented. The results indicate that that experienced searchers presented with this new system evolve new search strategies that make effective use of the new capabilities, that they achieve retrieval effectiveness comparable to results obtained using fully automatic techniques, and that reported satisfaction with support for cross-language searching increased. The paper concludes with a description of a freely available interactive CLIR system that incorporates lessons learned from this research.

Journal of The American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2006

A novel and complex form of information access is cross-language information retrieval: searching for texts written in foreign languages based on native language queries. Although the underlying technology for achieving such a search is relatively well understood, the appropriate interface design is not. The authors present three user evaluations undertaken during the iterative design of Clarity, a cross-language retrieval system for low-density languages, and shows how the user-interaction design evolved depending on the results of usability tests. The first test was instrumental to identify weaknesses in both functionalities and interface; the second was run to determine if query translation should be shown or not; the final was a global assessment and focused on user satisfaction criteria. Lessons were learned at every stage of the process leading to a much more informed view of what a cross-language retrieval system should offer to users.

Proceedings of the 25th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval - SIGIR '02, 2002

This paper reports on the user-centered design methodology and techniques used for the elicitation of user requirements and how these requirements informed the first phase of the user interface design for a Cross-Language Information Retrieval System. We describe a set of factors involved in analysis of the data collected and, finally discuss the implications for user interface design based on the findings.

2002

This paper describes the official runs of our team for CLEF 2002. We took part in the monolingual tasks for each of the seven non-English languages for which CLEF provides document collections (Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish). We also conducted our first experiments for the bilingual task (English to Dutch, and English to German), and took part in the GIRT and Amaryllis tasks. Finally, we experimented with the combination of runs.

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2004

This paper presents a case study of the development of an interface to a novel and complex form of document retrieval: searching for texts written in foreign languages based on native language queries. Although the underlying technology for achieving such a search is relatively well understood, the appropriate interface design is not. A study involving users (with such searching needs) from the start of the design process is described covering initial examination of user needs and tasks; preliminary design and testing of interface components; building, testing, and further refining an interface; before finally conducting usability tests of the system. Lessons are learned at every stage of the process leading to a much more informed view of how such an interface should be built.

2010

This article describes and evaluates various information retrieval models used to search document collections written in English through submitting queries written in various other languages, either members of the Indo-European family (English, French, German, and Spanish) or radically different language groups such as Chinese. This evaluation method involves searching a rather large number of topics (around 300) and using two commercial machine translation systems to translate across the language barriers. In this study, mean average precision is used to measure variances in retrieval effectiveness when a query language differs from the document language. Although performance differences are rather large for certain languages pairs, this does not mean that bilingual search methods are not commercially viable. Causes of the difficulties incurred when searching or during translation are analyzed and the results of concrete examples are explained.

Information processing & …, 2000

In this paper, we present the system MULINEX, a fully implemented system which supports cross-lingual search of the WWW. Users can formulate, expand and disambiguate queries, filter the search results and read the retrieved documents by using only their native language. This multilingual functionality is achieved by the use of dictionary-based query translation, multilingual document categorisation and automatic translation of summaries and documents. The system supports French, German and English and has been installed and tested in the online services of two European internet content and service provider companies. This paper focuses on the techniques and algorithms used in the MULINEX system, explaining how each component works and how it contributes to the overall functionality of the integrated system. The primary system functionalities are outlined from the user perspective, followed by a description of the document database used in the system. The technologies and linguistic resources used in the various system components are then described in detail.

CompSciRN: Frameworks (Topic), 2016

Internet usage is increasing at a rapid rate. Anyonecan access all sorts of information from the web at any time. But the language diversity of web pages restricts this access of information. Cross Lingual information Retrieval provides the solution to this problem, by allowing user to post their query in the native language and retrieve the documents in otherlanguages. Machine readable dictionaries are the mosteconomical resource of cross language translation. These dictionaries usually provide more than one translations in target language for source query terms. These translations need to be disambiguated to achieve the best translation for a query word.Once we achieve the correct translations, the cross lingual information system can match the monolingual informationretrieval on performance grade. In this paper we propose a framework for query translation and disambiguation to achieve an efficient cross lingual information system.

World conference on …, 2008

This paper describes a multilingual semantic search assistant (MSSA) that could help users find proper keywords in FAO fulltext-based search engines. The MSSA implements four independent functions each associated with the AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus to assist users in choosing better keywords: a Venn diagram-based Boolean search interface, an animated AGROVOC concept browser, cross-language query expansion for five official FAO languages, and domain-specific synonym expansion. A usability study of cross-language support and domain-specific synonym expansion was performed through a comparative evaluation of precision and recall in the WAICENT Information Finder. The cross-language support functionality yielded a significant increase in recall without any decrease in precision when compared to a simple search in. Domain-specific synonym expansion, on the other hand, made no significant difference in precision and recall. We suggest some ways to improve the performance of MSSA.

Proceeding of the 2nd ACM workshop on Improving non english web searching - iNEWS '08, 2008

Recent availability of commercial online machine translation (MT) systems makes it possible for layman Web users to utilize the MT capability for cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). To study the effectiveness of using MT for query translation, we conducted a set of experiments using Google Translate, an online MT system provided by Google, for translating queries in CLIR. The experiments show that MT is an excellent tool for the query translation task, and with the help of relevance feedback, it can achieve significant improvement over the monolingual baseline. The MT based query translation not only works for long queries, but is also effective for the short Web queries.