Issues and Challenges in Building Multilingual Information Access Systems

Author(s):  
Vasudeva Varma ◽  
Aditya Mogadala

In this chapter, the authors start their discussion highlighting the importance of Cross Lingual and Multilingual Information Retrieval and access research areas. They then discuss the distinction between Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR), Cross Language Information Access (CLIA), and Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) research areas. In addition, in further sections, issues and challenges in these areas are outlined, and various approaches, including machine learning-based and knowledge-based approaches to address the multilingual information access, are discussed. The authors describe various subsystems of a MLIA system ranging from query processing to output generation by sharing their experience of building a MLIA system and discuss its architecture. Then evaluation aspects of the MLIA and CLIA systems are discussed at the end of this chapter.

2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 448-477 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dong Zhou ◽  
Séamus Lawless ◽  
Xuan Wu ◽  
Wenyu Zhao ◽  
Jianxun Liu

Purpose – With an increase in the amount of multilingual content on the World Wide Web, users are often striving to access information provided in a language of which they are non-native speakers. The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive study of user profile representation techniques and investigate their use in personalized cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) systems through the means of personalized query expansion. Design/methodology/approach – The user profiles consist of weighted terms computed by using frequency-based methods such as tf-idf and BM25, as well as various latent semantic models trained on monolingual documents and cross-lingual comparable documents. This paper also proposes an automatic evaluation method for comparing various user profile generation techniques and query expansion methods. Findings – Experimental results suggest that latent semantic-weighted user profile representation techniques are superior to frequency-based methods, and are particularly suitable for users with a sufficient amount of historical data. The study also confirmed that user profiles represented by latent semantic models trained on a cross-lingual level gained better performance than the models trained on a monolingual level. Originality/value – Previous studies on personalized information retrieval systems have primarily investigated user profiles and personalization strategies on a monolingual level. The effect of utilizing such monolingual profiles for personalized CLIR remains unclear. The current study fills the gap by a comprehensive study of user profile representation for personalized CLIR and a novel personalized CLIR evaluation methodology to ensure repeatable and controlled experiments can be conducted.


2012 ◽  
pp. 1417-1433
Author(s):  
Vincent Claveau

This chapter presents a simple yet efficient approach to translate automatically unknown biomedical terms from one language into another. This approach relies on a machine learning process able to infer rewriting rules from examples, that is, from a list of paired terms in two studied languages. Any new term is then simply translated by applying the rewriting rules to it. When different translations are produced by conflicting rewriting rules, we use language modeling to single out the best candidate. The experiments reported here show that this technique yields very good results for different language pairs (including Czech, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and even Russian). The author also shows how this translation technique could be used in a cross-language information retrieval task and thus complete the dictionary-based existing approaches.


Author(s):  
Kula Kekeba Tune ◽  
Vasudeva Varma

Since most of the existing major search engines and commercial Information Retrieval (IR) systems are primarily designed for well-resourced European and Asian languages, they have paid little attention to the development of Cross-Language Information Access (CLIA) technologies for resource-scarce African languages. This paper presents the authors' experience in building CLIA for indigenous African languages, with a special focus on the development and evaluation of Oromo-English-CLIR. The authors have adopted a knowledge-based query translation approach to design and implement their initial Oromo-English CLIR (OMEN-CLIR). Apart from designing and building the first OMEN-CLIR from scratch, another major contribution of this study is assessing the performance of the proposed retrieval system at one of the well-recognized international Cross-Language Evaluation Forums like the CLEF campaign. The overall performance of OMEN-CLIR was found to be very promising and encouraging, given the limited amount of linguistic resources available for severely under-resourced African languages like Afaan Oromo.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 7598-7604
Author(s):  
H. V. T. Chi ◽  
D. L. Anh ◽  
N. L. Thanh ◽  
D. Dinh

Paraphrase identification is a crucial task in natural language understanding, especially in cross-language information retrieval. Nowadays, Multi-Task Deep Neural Network (MT-DNN) has become a state-of-the-art method that brings outstanding results in paraphrase identification [1]. In this paper, our proposed method based on MT-DNN [2] to detect similarities between English and Vietnamese sentences, is proposed. We changed the shared layers of the original MT-DNN from original the BERT [3] to other pre-trained multi-language models such as M-BERT [3] or XLM-R [4] so that our model could work on cross-language (in our case, English and Vietnamese) information retrieval. We also added some tasks as improvements to gain better results. As a result, we gained 2.3% and 2.5% increase in evaluated accuracy and F1. The proposed method was also implemented on other language pairs such as English – German and English – French. With those implementations, we got a 1.0%/0.7% improvement for English – German and a 0.7%/0.5% increase for English – French.


Author(s):  
Vincent Claveau

This chapter presents a simple yet efficient approach to translate automatically unknown biomedical terms from one language into another. This approach relies on a machine learning process able to infer rewriting rules from examples, that is, from a list of paired terms in two studied languages. Any new term is then simply translated by applying the rewriting rules to it. When different translations are produced by conflicting rewriting rules, we use language modeling to single out the best candidate. The experiments reported here show that this technique yields very good results for different language pairs (including Czech, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and even Russian). The author also shows how this translation technique could be used in a cross-language information retrieval task and thus complete the dictionary-based existing approaches.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-384
Author(s):  
Hosein Azarbonyad ◽  
Azadeh Shakery ◽  
Heshaam Faili

AbstractCross-language information retrieval (CLIR), finding information in one language in response to queries expressed in another language, has attracted much attention due to the explosive growth of multilingual information in the World Wide Web. One important issue in CLIR is how to apply monolingual information retrieval (IR) methods in cross-lingual environments. Recently, learning to rank (LTR) approach has been successfully employed in different IR tasks. In this paper, we use LTR for CLIR. In order to adapt monolingual LTR techniques in CLIR and pass the barrier of language difference, we map monolingual IR features to CLIR ones using translation information extracted from different translation resources. The performance of CLIR is highly dependent on the size and quality of available bilingual resources. Effective use of available resources is especially important in low-resource language pairs. In this paper, we further propose an LTR-based method for combining translation resources in CLIR. We have studied the effectiveness of the proposed approach using different translation resources. Our results also show that LTR can be used to successfully combine different translation resources to improve the CLIR performance. In the best scenario, the LTR-based combination method improves the performance of single-resource-based CLIR method by 6% in terms of Mean Average Precision.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Mathieu D'Aquin ◽  
Stefan Dietze

The 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) was held online from the 19 th to the 23 rd of October 2020. CIKM is an annual computer science conference, focused on research at the intersection of information retrieval, machine learning, databases as well as semantic and knowledge-based technologies. Since it was first held in the United States in 1992, 28 conferences have been hosted in 9 countries around the world.


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