To Translate or not to Translate?

Abstract

Query translation is an important task in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) aiming to translate queries into languages used in documents. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the necessity of translating query terms, which might differ from one term to another. Some untranslated terms cause irreparable performance drop while others do not. We propose an approach to estimate the translation probability of a query term, which helps decide if it should be translated or not. The approach learns regression and classification models based on a rich set of linguistic and statistical properties of the term. Experiments on NTCIR-4 and NTCIR-5 English-Chinese CLIR tasks demonstrate that the proposed approach can significantly improve CLIR performance. An in-depth analysis is also provided for discussing the impact of untranslated out-of-vocabulary (OOV) query terms and translation quality of non-OOV query terms on CLIR performance.