An Overview of Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Abstract

With the development of the Internet, various language resources are becoming more and more abundant. Users are no longer satisfied with obtaining information expressed only in their mother tongue, and there is a growing need to retrieve documents in other languages. It demands the advancement of technologies to eliminate the communication barriers among languages. Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), as a sub-field of information retrieval, can meet the purpose of users to retrieve information in other languages which are different from the queries, thus greatly improving the ability of users to retrieve multi-language documents. This paper introduces the translation techniques such as query translation, document translation and machine translation used in cross-language information retrieval, and analyzes their advantages and disadvantages. Besides, we also discuss the main challenges in cross-language information retrieval. We also introduce some of the latest algorithms and techniques, such as word embedding and query expansion. Finally, we summarize the overview and make a further outlook about CLIR.