Cross-Language Retrieval via Transitive Translation
Lisa A. Ballesteros · Kluwer Academic Publishers eBooks · 2005
The growth in availability of multi-lingual data in all areas of the public and private sector is driving an increasing need for systems that facilitate access to multi-lingual resources. Cross-language Retrieval (CLR) technology is a means of addressing this need. A CLR system must address two main hurdles to effective cross-language retrieval. First, it must address the ambiguity that arises when trying to map the meaning of text across languages. That is, it must address both within-language ambiguity and cross-language ambiguity. Second, it has to incorporate multilingual resources that will enable it to perform the mapping across languages. The difficulty here is that there is a limited number of lexical resources and virtually none for some pairs of languages. This work focuses on a dictionary approach to addressing the problem of limited lexical resources. A dictionary approach is taken since bilingual dictionaries are more prevalent and simpler to apply than other resources. We show that a transitive translation approach, where a third language is employed as an interlingua between the source and target languages, is a viable means of performing CLR between languages for which no bilingual dictionary is available. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.