Cross Language IR Philip Resnik Salim Roukos Workshop on Challenges in Information Retrieval and Language Modeling Amherst, Massachusetts, September 11-12, 2002

Global Internet User Population Source: Global Reach English Chinese If cross-language IR is “solved”, where is it???

Opportunities –World Wide Web –Research literature –Intranet applications Necessities in a post-9/11 world –High volume intelligence analysis –Replacing current Boolean engines (or worse!) –Dealing with the on-paper legacy

Challenge: Role of the User Query formulation for multilingual doc sets –Key idea: user needed in the query translation loop –Extracting examples from aligned parallel text Document selection –Key idea: full MT isn’t good enough –Presenting phrases and entities (not “crummy MT”) Query reformulation –Key idea: user’s understanding of the collection –Largely unexplored: different objective fn for MT

Challenge: Relating MT and IR It is typical to think of MT and IR as two different processes –Weighting developed with monolingual mindset –Steps toward factoring in translation ambiguity Toward integrated models –Beyond bags of words (or bags of n-grams) –Translingual search process (> 2 languages) –Use of context introduced by the search process –Document-level analysis, use of document context –Collection-level analysis