Querying across languages: a dictionary-based approach to multilingual information retrieval

The multilingual information retrieval system of the future will need to be able to retrieve documents across language boundaries. This extension of the classical IR problem is particularly challenging, ax significant resources are required to perform query translation. At Xerox, we are working to build a multilingual IR system and conducting a series of experiments to understand what factors are most important in making the system work. Using translated queries and a bilingual transfer dictionary, we have learned that crosslartguage multilingual IR is feasible, although performance lags considerably behind the monolingual standard. The experiments suggest that correct identification and translation of multi-word terminology is the single most important source of error in the system, although amblguit y in translation also contributes to poor performance.