An axiomatic approach to corpus-based cross-language information retrieval

Abstract

A major challenge in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is the adoption of translation knowledge in retrieval models, as it affects term weighting which is known to highly impact the retrieval performance. Despite its importance, how different approaches for integration of translation knowledge into retrieval models relatively perform has not been analytically examined. In this paper, we present an analytical investigation of using translation knowledge in CLIR. In particular, by adopting the axiomatic analysis framework, we formulate impacts of using translation knowledge on document ranking as constraints that any cross-language retrieval model should satisfy. We then consider state-of-the-art CLIR methods and check whether they satisfy these constraints. Our study shows that none of the existing methods satisfies all constraints. Based on the defined constraints, we propose the hierarchical query modeling method for CLIR which satisfies more constraints and achieves a higher CLIR performance, compared to the existing methods.