An empirical comparison of translation disambiguation techniques for Chinese-English cross-language information retrieval

Abstract

Disambiguation techniques are typically employed to reduce translation errors introduced during query translation in cross-lingual information retrieval. Previous work has used several techniques - based on term similarity, term co-occurrence, and language modelling. However, the previous experiments were conducted on different data sets, and thus the relative merits of each technique is presently unclear. The goal of this work is to compare the effectiveness of these techniques on the same Chinese-English data sets. Our results show that despite the different underlying models and formulae used, the aggregated results are comparable. However, there is wide variation in the translation of individual queries, suggesting that there is scope for further improvement. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.