Cross-language information retrieval models based on latent topic models trained with document-aligned comparable corpora

Abstract

In this paper, we study different applications of cross-language latent topic models trained on comparable corpora. The first focus lies on the task of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). The Bilingual Latent Dirichlet allocation model (BiLDA) allows us to create an interlingual, language-independent representation of both queries and documents. We construct several BiLDA-based document models for CLIR, where no additional translation resources are used. The second focus lies on the methods for extracting translation candidates and semantically related words using only per-topic word distributions of the cross-language latent topic model. As the main contribution, we combine the two former steps, blending the evidences from the per-document topic distributions and the per-topic word distributions of the topic model with the knowledge from the extracted lexicon. We design and evaluate the novel evidence-rich statistical model for CLIR, and prove that such a model, which combines various (only internal) evidences, obtains the best scores for experiments performed on the standard test collections of the CLEF 2001---2003 campaigns. We confirm these findings in an alternative evaluation, where we automatically generate queries and perform the known-item search on a test subset of Wikipedia articles. The main importance of this work lies in the fact that we train translation resources from comparable document-aligned corpora and provide novel CLIR statistical models that exhaustively exploit as many cross-lingual clues as possible in the quest for better CLIR results, without use of any additional external resources such as parallel corpora or machine-readable dictionaries.