Using Structured Queries for Disambiguation in Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Cross-Language Text and Speech Retrieval

Volume

Papers from the 1997 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Bilingual transthr 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 simile and automatic disambiguation in the target language. We derive a new weighted boolean model based on a probabilistic formulation (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.