Resolving query translation ambiguity using a decaying co-occurrence model and syntactic dependence relations
Jianfeng Gao, Ming Zhou, Jian‐Yun Nie, Hongzhao He, Wei‐Jun Chen · 2002
Bilingual dictionaries have been commonly used for query translation in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). However, we are faced with the problem of translation selection. Several recent studies suggested the utilization of term co-occurrences in this selection. This paper presents two extensions to improve them. First, we extend the basic co-occurrence model by adding a decaying factor that decreases the mutual information when the distance between the terms increases. Second, we incorporate a triple translation model, in which syntactic dependence relations (represented as triples) are integrated. Our evaluation on translation accuracy shows that translating triples as units is more precise than a word-by-word translation. Our CLIR experiments show that the addition of the decaying factor leads to substantial improvements of the basic co-occurrence model; and the triple translation model brings further improvements.