Making MIRACLEs

Abstract

Searching is inherently a user-centered process; people pose the questions for which machines seek answers, and ultimately people judge the degree to which retrieved documents meet their needs. Rapid development of interactive systems that use queries expressed in one language to search documents written in another poses five key challenges: (1) interaction design, (2) query formulation, (3) cross-language search, (4) construction of translated summaries, and (5) machine translation. This article describes the design of MIRACLE, an easily extensible system based on English queries that has previously been used to search French, German, and Spanish documents, and explains how the capabilities of MIRACLE were rapidly extended to accommodate Cebuano and Hindi. Evaluation results for the cross-language search component are presented for both languages, along with results from a brief full-system interactive experiment with Hindi. The article concludes with some observations on directions for further research on interactive cross-language information retrieval.