research-article

To translate or not to translate?

Authors:

Pu-Jen ChengAuthors Info & Claims

SIGIR '10: Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval

Pages 651 - 658

https://doi.org/10.1145/1835449.1835558

Published: 19 July 2010 Publication History

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.

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Cited By

Chen XGelernter JZhang HLiu J(2019)Multi-lingual geoparsing based on machine translationFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2017.07.05796:C(667-677)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.future.2017.07.057
Elayeb BBounhas I(2016)Arabic Cross-Language Information RetrievalACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing10.1145/278921015:3(1-44)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2789210
Darwish K(2014)Information RetrievalNatural Language Processing of Semitic Languages10.1007/978-3-642-45358-8_10(299-334)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45358-8_10
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

To translate or not to translate?
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGIR '10: Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval

July 2010

944 pages

ISBN:9781450301534

DOI:10.1145/1835449

General Chairs:
Fabio Crestani
University of Lugano, CH
,
Stéphane Marchand-Maillet
University of Geneva, CH
,
Program Chairs:
Hsin-Hsi Chen
National Taiwan University, TW
,
Efthimis N. Efthimiadis
University of Washington, USA
,
Jacques Savoy
University of Neuchatel, CH

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGIR: ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 July 2010

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SIGIR '10

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SIGIR

SIGIR '10: The 33rd International ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in Information Retrieval

July 19 - 23, 2010

Geneva, Switzerland

Acceptance Rates

SIGIR '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 87 of 520 submissions, 17%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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Cited By

Chen XGelernter JZhang HLiu J(2019)Multi-lingual geoparsing based on machine translationFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2017.07.05796:C(667-677)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.future.2017.07.057
Elayeb BBounhas I(2016)Arabic Cross-Language Information RetrievalACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing10.1145/278921015:3(1-44)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2789210
Darwish K(2014)Information RetrievalNatural Language Processing of Semitic Languages10.1007/978-3-642-45358-8_10(299-334)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45358-8_10
Zhou DTruran MBrailsford TWade VAshman H(2012)Translation techniques in cross-language information retrievalACM Computing Surveys10.1145/2379776.237977745:1(1-44)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2379776.2379777
Hefny ADarwish KAlkahky A(2011)Is a query worth translatingProceedings of the 33rd European conference on Advances in information retrieval10.5555/1996889.1996920(238-250)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1996889.1996920
Hefny ADarwish KAlkahky A(2011)Is a Query Worth TranslatingProceedings of the 33rd European Conference on Advances in Information Retrieval - Volume 661110.1007/978-3-642-20161-5_24(238-250)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-20161-5_24

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