Exploiting the LDC Chinese-English Bilingual Wordlist for Cross Language Information Retrieval

We investigated using the LDC English/Chinese bilingual wordlists for English-Chinese cross language retrieval. It is shown that the Chinese-to-English wordlist can be considered as both a phrase and word dictionary, and is preferable to the English-to-Chinese version in terms of phrase translation and word translation selection. Additional techniques such as frequency-based term selection, translation set weighting and term co-occurrence data were employed. Experiments show that within the TREC 5&6 Chinese corpus and retrieval environment, 74% of monolingual effectiveness is achievable for short queries of a few English words, and 85% for long queries of paragraph sizes. Keywords: cross language information retrieval; bilingual dictionaries.