A TREC Evaluation of Query Translation Methods For Multi-Lingual Text Retrieval.

Abstract

In a multi-lingual Text Retrieval (MLTR) system, queries in one language are used to retrieve documents in several languages. Although all of the collection documents could be translated to a single language, a more efficient approach is to simply translate the queries into each of the document languages. We have investigated five methods for query translation that rely on lexical-transfer and corpus-based methods for creating multi-lingual queries. The resulting queries produced by these systems were then used in a competitive information-retrieval environment and the results evaluated by the TREC evaluation group