Query Translation Using Evolutionary Programming for Multi-lingual Information Retrieval

Multi-lingual information retrieval (IR) systems apply queries in one language to a document collection in several different languages with the goal of retrieving only those documents relevant to the query. At first glance, deep linguistic analysis and translation of the query appears necessary before retrievals can be performed. IR systems are unique in natural language processing, however, because a pattern of term occurrences in a document generally suffices to determine the subject matter; word order is largely irrelevant. Translated queries are therefore primarily derived by a mapping from a word set in the query language to a word set in the language of the derived query. Large parallel text collections with sentencelevel alignments can provide a baseline for evaluating the correctness of a query translation, but the determination of members of the query translation remains problematic. Constructing a query from machine-readable, bilingual dictionaries and assigning term weights ..