A method for supporting document selection in cross-language information retrieval and its evaluation

Abstract

It is important to give useful clues for selecting desiredcontent from a number of retrieval results obtained (usually) from avague search request. Compared with monolingual retrieval, such asupport framework is inevitable and much more significant for filteringgiven translingual retrieval results. This paper describes an attempt toprovide appropriate translation of major keywords in each document in across-language information retrieval (CLIR) result, as a browsingsupport for users. Our idea of determining appropriate translation ofmajor keywords is based on word co-occurrence distribution in thetranslation target language, considering the actual situation of WWWcontent where it is difficult to obtain aligned parallel (multilingual)corpora. The proposed method provides higher quality of keywordtranslation to yield a more effective support in identifying the targetdocuments in the retrieval result. We report the advantage of thisbrowsing support technique through evaluation experiments includingcomparison with conditions of referring to a translated documentsummary, and discuss related issues to be examined towards moreeffective cross-language information extraction.