An Experimental Assessment of Direct Versus Interlingual Translationfor Cross-Language Information Retrieval

May 2004

Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2004)

Volume

Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2004)

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Weintroduce an interlingua-based approach to crosslanguage information retrieval, in which queries, as well as documents, are mapped onto a language-independent concept layer and retrieval operations are performed at the level of that interlingua. This approach is contrasted with one which operates without such an intermediary concept level. Non-English queries (German ones, in our experiments) are directly translated to English queries which, subsequently, are processed on English documents. We provide an empirical evaluation of both alternatives on a large medical document collection.