Translation of unknown terms via web mining for information retrieval

Abstract

Many English words appear in Asian language texts, especially in the news reports and technical documents. Although a foreign term and its counterpart in English refer to the same concept, they are erroneously treated as independent index units in traditional monolingual IR. For CLIR, one of the major hindrances to achieving retrieval performance at the level of monolingual information retrieval is the translation of terms in queries, which are not found in a bilingual dictionary. This paper describes the degree to which these problems arise in Korean Information Retrieval and suggests a novel approach to solve it. Experimental results based on NTCIR and KT-Set test collections show that the high translation precision of our approach greatly improves the IR performance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.