Combining multiple sources for short query translation in Chinese-English cross-language information retrieval

Abstract

In this paper, we examine various factors that affect the retrieval performance of Chinese-English cross-language retrieval. The factors include segmentation dictionary coverage, segmentation algorithm, transfer dictionary coverage, transfer dictionary quality, and translation disambiguarion. The paper intreduces an idea of recovering the original English names for the transliterated Chinese words, mainly the proper names, using search engine. We used two transfer dictionaries and a Chinese search engine to translate short Chinese queries into English. The majority of the Chinese words were translated into English, but the overall precision of the Chinese to English eross-language retrieval is only about 56% of the overall precision for the monolingual retrieval.