An Experimental Assessment of Direct Versus. Interlingual Translation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval

We introduce an interlingua-based approach to crosslanguage information retrieval, in which queries, as well as documents, are mapped onto a language-independent concept layer and retrieval operations are performed at the level of that interlingua. This approach is contrasted with one which operates without such an intermediary concept level. Non-English queries (German ones, in our experiments) are directly translated to English queries which, subsequently, are processed on English documents. We provide an empirical evaluation of both alternatives on a large medical document collection.