Query Translation Disambiguation as Graph Partitioning

Resolving ambiguity in the process of query translation is crucial to cross-language information retrieval when only a bilingual dictionary is available. In this paper we propose a novel approach for query translation disambiguation, named “spectral query translation model”. The proposed approach views the problem of query translation disambiguation as a graph partitioning problem. For a given query, a weighted graph is first created for all possible translations of query words based on the co-occurrence statistics of the translation words. The best translation of the query is then determined by the most strongly connected component within the graph. The proposed approach distinguishes from previous approaches in that the translations of all query words are estimated simultaneously. Furthermore, translation probabilities are introduced in the proposed approach to capture the uncertainty in translating queries. Empirical studies with TREC datasets have shown that the spectral query translation model achieves a relative 20% - 50% improvement in cross-language information retrieval, compared to other approaches that also exploit word co-occurrence statistics for query translation disambiguation.

Authors

• Yi Liu City University of Hong Kong

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