Multilingual Schema Matching for Wikipedia Infoboxes

Recent research has taken advantage of Wikipedia's multilingualism as a resource for cross-language information retrieval and machine translation, as well as proposed techniques for enriching its cross-language structure. The availability of documents in multiple languages also opens up new opportunities for querying structured Wikipedia content, and in particular, to enable answers that straddle different languages. As a step towards supporting such queries, in this paper, we propose a method for identifying mappings between attributes from infoboxes that come from pages in different languages. Our approach finds mappings in a completely automated fashion. Because it does not require training data, it is scalable: not only can it be used to find mappings between many language pairs, but it is also effective for languages that are under-represented and lack sufficient training samples. Another important benefit of our approach is that it does not depend on syntactic similarity between attribute names, and thus, it can be applied to language pairs that have distinct morphologies. We have performed an extensive experimental evaluation using a corpus consisting of pages in Portuguese, Vietnamese, and English. The results show that not only does our approach obtain high precision and recall, but it also outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. We also present a case study which demonstrates that the multilingual mappings we derive lead to substantial improvements in answer quality and coverage for structured queries over Wikipedia content.Comment: VLDB201

MIRACLE Retrieval Experiments with East Asian Languages

This paper describes the participation of MIRACLE in NTCIR 2005 CLIR task. Although our group has a strong background and long expertise in Computational Linguistics and Information Retrieval applied to European languages and using Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, this was our first attempt on East Asian languages. Our main goal was to study the particularities and distinctive characteristics of Japanese, Chinese and Korean, specially focusing on the similarities and differences with European languages, and carry out research on CLIR tasks which include those languages. The basic idea behind our participation in NTCIR is to test if the same familiar linguisticbased techniques may also applicable to East Asian languages, and study the necessary adaptations

Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks: Resurrecting Multilingual Retrieval Using Zero-shot Learning

While billions of non-English speaking users rely on search engines every day, the problem of ad-hoc information retrieval is rarely studied for non-English languages. This is primarily due to a lack of data set that are suitable to train ranking algorithms. In this paper, we tackle the lack of data by leveraging pre-trained multilingual language models to transfer a retrieval system trained on English collections to non-English queries and documents. Our model is evaluated in a zero-shot setting, meaning that we use them to predict relevance scores for query-document pairs in languages never seen during training. Our results show that the proposed approach can significantly outperform unsupervised retrieval techniques for Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, and Spanish. We also show that augmenting the English training collection with some examples from the target language can sometimes improve performance.Comment: ECIR 2020 (short

Bridging the Gap Between Indexing and Retrieval for Differentiable Search Index with Query Generation

The Differentiable Search Index (DSI) is an emerging paradigm for information retrieval. Unlike traditional retrieval architectures where index and retrieval are two different and separate components, DSI uses a single transformer model to perform both indexing and retrieval. In this paper, we identify and tackle an important issue of current DSI models: the data distribution mismatch that occurs between the DSI indexing and retrieval processes. Specifically, we argue that, at indexing, current DSI methods learn to build connections between the text of long documents and the identifier of the documents, but then retrieval of document identifiers is based on queries that are commonly much shorter than the indexed documents. This problem is further exacerbated when using DSI for cross-lingual retrieval, where document text and query text are in different languages. To address this fundamental problem of current DSI models, we propose a simple yet effective indexing framework for DSI, called DSI-QG. When indexing, DSI-QG represents documents with a number of potentially relevant queries generated by a query generation model and re-ranked and filtered by a cross-encoder ranker. The presence of these queries at indexing allows the DSI models to connect a document identifier to a set of queries, hence mitigating data distribution mismatches present between the indexing and the retrieval phases. Empirical results on popular mono-lingual and cross-lingual passage retrieval datasets show that DSI-QG significantly outperforms the original DSI model.Comment: 11 page

Cross-Lingual Adaptation using Structural Correspondence Learning

Cross-lingual adaptation, a special case of domain adaptation, refers to the transfer of classification knowledge between two languages. In this article we describe an extension of Structural Correspondence Learning (SCL), a recently proposed algorithm for domain adaptation, for cross-lingual adaptation. The proposed method uses unlabeled documents from both languages, along with a word translation oracle, to induce cross-lingual feature correspondences. From these correspondences a cross-lingual representation is created that enables the transfer of classification knowledge from the source to the target language. The main advantages of this approach over other approaches are its resource efficiency and task specificity. We conduct experiments in the area of cross-language topic and sentiment classification involving English as source language and German, French, and Japanese as target languages. The results show a significant improvement of the proposed method over a machine translation baseline, reducing the relative error due to cross-lingual adaptation by an average of 30% (topic classification) and 59% (sentiment classification). We further report on empirical analyses that reveal insights into the use of unlabeled data, the sensitivity with respect to important hyperparameters, and the nature of the induced cross-lingual correspondences

iCLEF 2006 Overview: Searching the Flickr WWW photo-sharing repository

This paper summarizes the task design for iCLEF 2006 (the CLEF interactive track). Compared to previous years, we have proposed a radically new task: searching images in a naturally multilingual database, Flickr, which has millions of photographs shared by people all over the planet, tagged and described in a wide variety of languages. Participants are expected to build a multilingual search front-end to Flickr (using Flickr’s search API) and study the behaviour of the users for a given set of searching tasks. The emphasis is put on studying the process, rather than evaluating its outcome