Two-stage refinement of transitive query translation with English disambiguation for cross-language information retrieval: An experiment at CLEF 2004

This paper reports experimental results of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) from German to French. The authors focus on CLIR in cases where available language resources are very limited. Thus transitive translation of queries using English as a pivot language was used to search French document collections for German queries without any direct bilingual dictionary or MT system for these two languages. The two-stage refinement of query translations that we proposed at the previous CLEF 2003 campaign is again used for enhancing performance of the pivot language approach. In particular, disambiguation of English terms in the middle stage of transitive translation was attempted as a new experiment. Our results show that the two-stage refinement method is able to significantly improve search performance of bilingual IR using a pivot language, but unfortunately, the English disambiguation has almost no effect.