The Effects of Conjunction, Facet Structure, and Dictionary Combinations in Concept-Based Cross-Language Retrieval

The paper studies concept-based cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). The document collection was a subset of the TREC collection. The test requests were formed from TREC's health related topics. As translation dictionaries the study used a general dictionary and a domain-specific (=medical) dictionary. The effects of translation method, conjunction, and facet order on the effectiveness of concept-based cross-language queries were studied, and concept-based structuring of cross-language queries was compared to mechanical structuring based on the output of dictionaries. The performance of translated Finnish queries against English documents was compared to the performance of original English queries against the English documents, and the performance of different CLIR query types was compared with one another. No major difference was found between concept-based and mechanical structuring. The best translation method was a simultaneous look-up in the medical dictionary and the general dictionary, in which case cross-language queries performed as well as the original English queries. The results showed that especially at high exhaustivity (the number of mutually restrictive concepts in a request) levels cross-language queries perform well in relation to monolingual queries. This suggests that conjunction disambiguates cross-language queries. An extensive study was made of the relative importance of the concepts of requests. On the basis of the classification data of request concepts it was shown how the order of facets in a query affects cross-language as well as monolingual queries.

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