Exploiting Bilingual Information to Improve Web Search

Abstract

Web search quality can vary widely across languages, even for the same information need. We propose to exploit this variation in quality by learning a ranking function on bilingual queries: queries that appear in query logs for two languages but represent equivalent search interests. For a given bilingual query, along with corresponding monolingual query log and monolingual ranking, we generate a ranking on pairs of documents, one from each language. Then we learn a linear ranking function which exploits bilingual features on pairs of documents, as well as standard monolingual features. Finally, we show how to reconstruct monolingual ranking from a learned bilingual ranking. Using publicly available Chinese and English query logs, we demonstrate for both languages that our ranking technique exploiting bilingual data leads to significant improvements over a state-of-the-art monolingual ranking algorithm.