Research on English-Chinese Bi-directional Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Abstract

With the rapid growing amount of information available to us, the situations that a user needs to use a retrieval system to perform querying a multilingual document collection are becoming increasingly emerging and common. Thus an important problem is formed, to match the user queries specified in one language against documents in another different language, i.e. Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). Based on the work in CLIR evaluation task in the 9th Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-9), we have constructed an English-Chinese bi-directional CLIR system. In this system, we adopt English-Chinese bi-directional query translation as the dominant strategy, use English and Chinese queries as translation objects, and utilize English and Chinese machine readable dictionaries as the important knowledge source to acquire correct translations. By combining English and Chinese monolingual IR systems constructed by us, the complete English-Chinese bi-directional CLIR process can be implemented successfully.