research-article

Exploiting Representations from Statistical Machine Translation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Authors:

Jimmy LinAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), Volume 32, Issue 4

Article No.: 19, Pages 1 - 32

https://doi.org/10.1145/2644807

Published: 28 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

This work explores how internal representations of modern statistical machine translation systems can be exploited for cross-language information retrieval. We tackle two core issues that are central to query translation: how to exploit context to generate more accurate translations and how to preserve ambiguity that may be present in the original query, thereby retaining a diverse set of translation alternatives. These two considerations are often in tension since ambiguity in natural language is typically resolved by exploiting context, but effective retrieval requires striking the right balance. We propose two novel query translation approaches: the grammar-based approach extracts translation probabilities from translation grammars, while the decoder-based approach takes advantage of n-best translation hypotheses. Both are context-sensitive, in contrast to a baseline context-insensitive approach that uses bilingual dictionaries for word-by-word translation. Experimental results show that by “opening up” modern statistical machine translation systems, we can access intermediate representations that yield high retrieval effectiveness. By combining evidence from multiple sources, we demonstrate significant improvements over competitive baselines on standard cross-language information retrieval test collections. In addition to effectiveness, the efficiency of our techniques are explored as well.

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Yu PAllan JHuang JChang YCheng XKamps JMurdock VWen JLiu Y(2020)A Study of Neural Matching Models for Cross-lingual IRProceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3397271.3401322(1637-1640)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2020
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Index Terms

Exploiting Representations from Statistical Machine Translation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Retrieval models and ranking

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cover image ACM Transactions on Information Systems

ACM Transactions on Information Systems Volume 32, Issue 4

October 2014

198 pages

ISSN:1046-8188

EISSN:1558-2868

DOI:10.1145/2684820

Editor:
Maarten de Rijke
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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Copyright © 2014 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 28 October 2014

Accepted: 01 July 2014

Revised: 01 May 2014

Received: 01 December 2013

Published in TOIS Volume 32, Issue 4

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Cited By

Sharma VMittal NVidyarthi A(2023)Semantic morphological variant selection and translation disambiguation for cross-lingual information retrievalMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-021-11074-w82:6(8197-8212)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11042-021-11074-w
Yu PAllan JHuang JChang YCheng XKamps JMurdock VWen JLiu Y(2020)A Study of Neural Matching Models for Cross-lingual IRProceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3397271.3401322(1637-1640)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3397271.3401322
Ghanbari EShakery A(2019)Query-dependent learning to rank for cross-lingual information retrievalKnowledge and Information Systems10.1007/s10115-018-1232-859:3(711-743)Online publication date: 15-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10115-018-1232-8
Li BGaussier EYang D(2018)The Dilution/Concentration conditions for cross-language information retrieval modelsInformation Processing & Management10.1016/j.ipm.2017.11.00854:2(291-302)Online publication date: Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2017.11.008
Zhou DZhao WWu XLawless SLiu J(2018)An iterative method for personalized results adaptation in cross-language searchInformation Sciences10.1016/j.ins.2017.11.044430-431(200-215)Online publication date: Mar-2018
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Abdul-Rauf SSchwenk HLambert PNawaz M(2016)Empirical use of information retrieval to build synthetic data for SMT domain adaptationIEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing10.1109/TASLP.2016.251731824:4(745-754)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2016
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Yan JChao W(2015)English Language Statistical Machine Translation Oriented Classification AlgorithmProceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Intelligent Transportation, Big Data & Smart City (ICITBS)10.1109/ICITBS.2015.99(376-379)Online publication date: 19-Dec-2015
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