Using Structured Queries for Disambiguation in Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Abstract

Bilingual transfer dictionaries are an important resource for query translation in cross-language text retrieval. However, term translation is not an isomorphic process, so dictionary-based systems must address the problem of ambiguity in language translation. In this paper, we claim that boolean conjunction (the AND operator) provides simple and automatic disambiguation in the target language. We derive a new weighted boolean model based on a probabilistic formulation and apply it to the crosslanguage text retrieval problem. The results suggest that the weighted boolean model is highly effective for general text retrieval, but more experimental evidence is need to conclude that it is particularly advantageous for cross-language application. Nonetheless, the preliminary results are quite promising. 1 Introduction With the ongoing development of multilingual information retrieval systems, researchers are becoming increasing interested in the problem of cross-language information retrie...