Abstract
The growth in availability of multi-lingual data in all areas of the public and private sector is driving an increasing need for systems that facilitate access to multi-lingual resources. Cross-language Retrieval (CLR) technology is a means of addressing this need.
A CLR system must address two main hurdles to effective cross-language retrieval. First, it must address the ambiguity that arises when trying to map the meaning of text across languages. That is, it must address both within-language ambiguity and cross-language ambiguity. Second, it has to incorporate multilingual resources that will enable it to perform the mapping across languages. The difficulty here is that there is a limited number of lexical resources and virtually none for some pairs of languages.
This work focuses on a dictionary approach to addressing the problem of limited lexical resources. A dictionary approach is taken since bilingual dictionaries are more prevalent and simpler to apply than other resources. We show that a transitive translation approach, where a third language is employed as an interlingua between the source and target languages, is a viable means of performing CLR between languages for which no bilingual dictionary is available.
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Ballesteros, L.A. (2002). Cross-Language Retrieval via Transitive Translation. In: Croft, W.B. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. The Information Retrieval Series, vol 7. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-47019-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-47019-5_8
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