English-Arabic Cross-Language Information Retrieval Based on Parallel Documents
Hani Abu‐Salem, PHILIP KA-FAI CHAN · International Journal of Computer Processing Of Languages · 2006
In cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), queries in a source language are used to retrieve relevant documents in a target language. This paper describes the automatic construction of a translation matrix for English-Arabic CLIR applications. English-Arabic parallel sentences are translated using an adaptation of the expected mutual information measure (EMIM) technique and a matrix of translation terms is created. We evaluate our translation matrix as part of a retrieval system by comparing the effectiveness of cross-language retrieval and monolingual retrieval. The results show that the performance of English-Arabic CLIR using the translation matrix for query translation is either comparable to or better than that of monolingual Arabic retrieval depending on the number of translation terms used and the type of indexing method chosen.