An Investigation of Cross-Language Information Retrieval for User-Generated Internet Video

Increasing amounts of user-generated video content are being uploaded to online repositories. This content is often very uneven in quality and topical coverage in different languages. The lack of material in individual languages means that cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) within these collections is required to satisfy the user's information need. Search over this content is dependent on available metadata, which includes user-generated annotations and often noisy transcripts of spoken audio. The effectiveness of CLIR depends on translation quality between query and content languages. We investigate CLIR effectiveness for the blip10000 archive of user-generated Internet video content. We examine the retrieval effectiveness using the title and free-text metadata provided by the uploader and automatic speech recognition (ASR) generated transcripts. Retrieval is carried out using the Divergence From Randomness models, and automatic translation using Google translate. Our experimental investigation indicates that different sources of evidence have different retrieval effectiveness and in particular differing levels of performance in CLIR. Specifically, we find that the retrieval effectiveness of the ASR source is significantly degraded in CLIR. Our investigation also indicates that for this task the Title source provides the most robust source of evidence for CLIR, and performs best when used in combination with other sources of evidence. We suggest areas for investigation to give most effective and robust CLIR performance for user-generated content.