Multilingual Information Retrieval

We are living in a multilingual world and the diversity in languages which are used to interact with information access systems has generated a wide variety of challenges to be addressed by computer and information scientists. The growing amount of non-English information accessible globally and the increased worldwide exposure of enterprises also necessitates the adaptation of Information Retrieval (IR) methods to new, multilingual settings. Peters, Braschler and Clough present a comprehensive description of the technologies involved in designing and developing systems for Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR). They provide readers with broad coverage of the various issues involved in creating systems to make accessible digitally stored materials regardless of the language(s) they are written in. Details on Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) are also covered that help readers to understand how to develop retrieval systems that cross language boundaries. Their work is divided into six chapters and accompanies the reader step-by-step through the various stages involved in building, using and evaluating MLIR systems. The book concludes with some examples of recent applications that utilise MLIR technologies. Some of the techniques described have recently started to appear in commercial search systems, while others have the potential to be part of future incarnations. The book is intended for graduate students, scholars, and practitioners with a basic understanding of classical text retrieval methods. It offers guidelines and information on all aspects that need to be taken into consideration when building MLIR systems, while avoiding too many ‘hands-on details’ that could rapidly become obsolete. Thus it bridges the gap between the material covered by most of the classical IR textbooks and the novel requirements related to the acquisition and dissemination of information in whatever language it is stored.

Search for information is no longer exclusively limited within the native language of the user, but is more and more extended to other languages. This gives rise to the problem of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), whose goal is to find relevant information written in a different language to a query. In addition to the problems of monolingual information retrieval (IR), translation is the key problem in CLIR: one should translate either the query or the documents from a language to another. However, this translation problem is not identical to full-text machine translation (MT): the goal is not to produce a human-readable translation, but a translation suitable for finding relevant documents. Specific translation methods are thus required. The goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive description of the specific problems arising in CLIR, the solutions proposed in this area, as well as the remaining problems. The book starts with a general description of the monolingual IR and CLIR problems. Different classes of approaches to translation are then presented: approaches using an MT system, dictionary-based translation and approaches based on parallel and comparable corpora. In addition, the typical retrieval effectiveness using different approaches is compared. It will be shown that translation approaches specifically designed for CLIR can rival and outperform high-quality MT systems. Finally, the book offers a look into the future that draws a strong parallel between query expansion in monolingual IR and query translation in CLIR, suggesting that many approaches developed in monolingual IR can be adapted to CLIR. The book can be used as an introduction to CLIR. Advanced readers can also find more technical details and discussions about the remaining research challenges in the future. It is suitable to new researchers who intend to carry out research on CLIR. Table of Contents: Preface / Introduction / Using Manually Constructed Translation Systems and Resources for CLIR / Translation Based on Parallel and Comparable Corpora / Other Methods to Improve CLIR / A Look into the Future: Toward a Unified View of Monolingual IR and CLIR? / References / Author Biography

Search for information is no longer exclusively limited within the native language of the user, but is more and more extended to other languages. This gives rise to the problem of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), whose goal is to find relevant information written in a different language to a query. In addition to the problems of monolingual information retrieval (IR), translation is the key problem in CLIR: one should translate either the query or the documents from a language to another. However, this translation problem is not identical to full-text machine translation (MT): the goal is not to produce a human-readable translation, but a translation suitable for finding relevant documents. Specific translation methods are thus required. The goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive description of the specific problems arising in CLIR, the solutions proposed in this area, as well as the remaining problems. The book starts with a general description of the monolingual IR and CLIR problems. Different classes of approaches to translation are then presented: approaches using an MT system, dictionary-based translation and approaches based on parallel and comparable corpora. In addition, the typical retrieval effectiveness using different approaches is compared. It will be shown that translation approaches specifically designed for CLIR can rival and outperform high-quality MT systems. Finally, the book offers a look into the future that draws a strong parallel between query expansion in monolingual IR and query translation in CLIR, suggesting that many approaches developed in monolingual IR can be adapted to CLIR. The book can be used as an introduction to CLIR. Advanced readers can also find more technical details and discussions about the remaining research challenges in the future. It is suitable to new researchers who intend to carry out research on CLIR. Table of Contents: Preface / Introduction / Using Manually Constructed Translation Systems and Resources for CLIR / Translation Based on Parallel and Comparable Corpora / Other Methods to Improve CLIR / A Look into the Future: Toward a Unified View of Monolingual IR and CLIR? / References / Author Biography

Information extraction (IE) and text summarization (TS) are powerful technologies for finding relevant pieces of information in text and presenting them to the user in condensed form. The ongoing information explosion makes IE and TS critical for successful functioning within the information society. These technologies face particular challenges due to the inherent multi-source nature of the information explosion. The technologies must now handle not isolated texts or individual narratives, but rather large-scale repositories and streams---in general, in multiple languages---containing a multiplicity of perspectives, opinions, or commentaries on particular topics, entities or events. There is thus a need to adapt existing techniques and develop new ones to deal with these challenges. This volume contains a selection of papers that present a variety of methodologies for content identification and extraction, as well as for content fusion and regeneration. The chapters cover various aspects of the challenges, depending on the nature of the information sought---names vs. events,--- and the nature of the sources---news streams vs. image captions vs. scientific research papers, etc. This volume aims to offer a broad and representative sample of studies from this very active research field.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 7th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2006, held in Alicante, Spain, September 2006. The revised papers presented together with an introduction were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on Multilingual Textual Document Retrieval, Domain-Specifig Information Retrieval, i-CLEF, QA@CLEF, ImageCLEF, CLSR, WebCLEF and GeoCLEF.

Most of the papers in this volume were first presented at the Workshop on Cross-Linguistic Information Retrieval that was held August 22, 1996 dur ing the SIGIR'96 Conference. Alan Smeaton of Dublin University and Paraic Sheridan of the ETH, Zurich, were the two other members of the Scientific Committee for this workshop. SIGIR is the Association for Computing Ma chinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, and they have held conferences yearly since 1977. Three additional papers have been added: Chapter 4 Distributed Cross-Lingual Information retrieval describes the EMIR retrieval system, one of the first general cross-language systems to be implemented and evaluated; Chapter 6 Mapping Vocabularies Using Latent Semantic Indexing, which originally appeared as a technical report in the Lab oratory for Computational Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University in 1991, is included here because it was one of the earliest, though hard-to-find, publi cations showing the application of Latent Semantic Indexing to the problem of cross-language retrieval; and Chapter 10 A Weighted Boolean Model for Cross Language Text Retrieval describes a recent approach to solving the translation term weighting problem, specific to Cross-Language Information Retrieval. Gregory Grefenstette CONTRIBUTORS Lisa Ballesteros David Hull W, Bruce Croft Gregory Grefenstette Center for Intelligent Xerox Research Centre Europe Information Retrieval Grenoble Laboratory Computer Science Department University of Massachusetts Thomas K. Landauer Department of Psychology Mark W. Davis and Institute of Cognitive Science Computing Research Lab University of Colorado, Boulder New Mexico State University Michael L. Littman Bonnie J.

The eighth campaign of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for - ropean languages was held from January to September 2007. There were seven distinct evaluation tracks in CLEF 2007, designed to test the performance of a wide range of multilingual information access systems or system components. CLEF is by now an established international evaluation initiative and, in 2007, 81 groups from all over the world submitted results for one or more of the di?erent evaluation tracks. Full details regarding the design of the tracks, the methodologies used for evaluation, and the results obtained by the participants can be found in the di?erent sections of these proceedings. As always the results of the campaign were reported and discussed at the annual workshop, held in Budapest, Hungary, 19-21 September, immediately following the eleventh European Conference on Digital Libraries. The workshop playsanimportantrolebyprovidingtheopportunityforallthe groupsthathave participated in the evaluation campaign to get together to compare approaches and exchange ideas.

The ?fth campaign of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for Eu- pean languages was held from January to September 2004. Participation in the CLEF campaigns has increased each year and CLEF 2004 was no exception: 55 groups submitted results for one or more of the di?erent tracks compared with 42 groups in the previous year. CLEF 2004 also marked a breaking point with respect to previous campaigns. The focus was no longer mainly concentrated on multilingual document retrieval as in previous years but was diversi?ed to include di?erent kinds of text retrieval across languages (e. g. , exact answers in the question-answering track) and retrieval on di?erent kinds of media (i. e. , not just plain text but collections containing image and speech as well). In ad- tion, increasing attention was given to issues that regard system usability and user satisfaction with tasks to measure the e?ectiveness of interactive systems or system components being included in both the cross-language question - swering and image retrieval tasks with the collaboration of the coordinators of the interactive track. The campaign culminated in a two-and-a-half-day workshop held in Bath, UK, 15–17 September, immediately following the 8th European Conference on Digital Libraries. The workshop was attended by nearly 100 researchers and s- tem developers.