Japanese-english cross-language information retrieval integrating query and document translation methods

In cross-language information retrieval the search query and documents may undergo translation; here the question of how the task is converted into a monolingual information retrieval problem is of significant importance. The method that we propose in this research involves translating the query into the language of the document collection and performing a search on the basis of this; in addition, we apply machine translation to the returned documents converting them to the language of the user and refine the precision of the ranking with these results. The effectiveness of this method is verified in retrieval experiments using Japanese queries and English document abstracts. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.