Query translation in Chinese-English cross-language information retrieval

Abstract

This paper proposed a new query translation method based on the mutual information matrices of terms in the Chinese and English corpora. Instead of looking up a bilingual phrase dictionary, the compositional phrase (the translation of phrase can be derived fxom the translation of its components) in the query can be indirectly translated via a general-purpose Chinese-English dictionary look-up procedure. A novel selection method for translations of query terms is also presented in detail. Our query translation method ultimately constructs an English query in which each query term has a weight. The evaluation results show that the retrieval performance achieved by our query translation method is about 73% of monolingual information retrieval and is about 28% higher than that of simple wordby -word translation way.