Cross-Language Information Retrieval

By Gregory Grefenstette

Subjects: Translators (Computer programs), Data structures (Computer science), Artificial intelligence, Information storage and retrieval systems, Computer science

Description: The universal adoption of the Internet and the WWW have created an enormous, multilingual virtual textual database. Rather than looking upon foreign language documents as distracting noise, one can consider these documents as untapped sources of information. Cross-Language Information Retrieval is the first book that addresses the problem of accessing multilingual information through a single-language query. This research problem is receiving growing attention by US and foreign governments. Cross-Language Information Retrieval describes the problem, highlighting the differences between the field and the related areas of Machine Translation and Information Retrieval. Researchers from Europe, Japan and America present a wide variety of techniques and experimental results. The life-size experiments are run on modern large-scale retrieval testbeds, running up to hundreds of megabytes of texts. The techniques involve using bilingual dictionaries, machine translation systems, parallel text corpora, comparable but non-parallel text corpora, latent semantic indexing, and weighted Boolean interrogation. Cross-Language Information Retrieval is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on Cross-Language Information Retrieval, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.