Query or Document Translation for Academic Search – What’s the Real Difference?

Abstract

We compare query and document translation from and to English, French, German and Spanish for multilingual retrieval in an academic search portal: PubPsych. Both translation approaches improve the retrieval performance of the system with document translation providing better results. Performance inversely correlates with the amount of available original language documents. The more documents already available in a language, the fewer improvements can be observed. Retrieval performance with English as a source language does not improve with translation as most documents already contained English-language content in our text collection. The large-scale evaluation study is based on a corpus of more than 1M metadata documents and 50 real queries taken from the query log files of the portal.