Evaluating resources for query translation in cross-language information retrieval
Bonnie Jean Dorr, Douglas W. Oard · 1998
Our goal is to evaluate the utility of a lexical resource containing Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCS) for use in cross-language information retrieval. Our evaluation makes use of a combination of techniques from interlingual machine translation (Dorr, 1993) with conventional information retrieval techniques (Oard, 1996; Oard and Dorr, 1996). Given a query in one language, we transform the query into the corresponding terms in a second language. We evaluate this approach by comparing the resulting retrieval effectiveness with two translation-based techniques as well as two techniques for determining the lower and upper bound. The main innovation of this work is that it provides a principled framework for controlling translation ambiguity in cross-language information retrieval applications. Our focus is on the construction of disambiguated (target-language) queries by using verb-based entries in our lexicon to construct Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCS). We view our approach as a cru...