Effective Arabic-English Cross-Language Information Retrieval via Machine-Readable Dictionaries and Machine Translation

In Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), queries in one language retrieve relevant documents in other languages. Machine-Readable Dictionary (MRD) and Machine Translation (MT) are important resources for query translation in CLIR. We investigate MT and MRD to Arabic-English CLIR. The translation ambiguity associated with these resources is the key problem. We present three methods of query translation using a bilingual dictionary for Arabic-English CLIR. First, we present the Every-Match (EM) method. This method yields ambiguous translations since many extraneous terms are added to the original query. To disambiguate the query translation, we present the FirstMatch (FM) method that considers the first match in the dictionary as the candidate term. Finally, we present the TwoPhase (TP) method. We show that good retrieval effectiveness can be achieved without complex resources using the Two-Phase method for Arabic-English CLIR. We also empirically evaluate the effectiveness of th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: Mohammed Aljlayl, Ophir Frieder
• Keywords: Arabic-English CLIR, CIKM 2001, Cross-language Information Retrieval, Information Management, Query Translation