Two-stage refinement of query translation in a pivot language approach to cross-lingual information retrieval: An experiment at CLEF 2003

This paper reports experimental results of cross-lingual information retrieval from German to Italian. The authors are concerned with 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 Italian document collections for German queries without any direct bilingual dictionary or MT system for these two languages. In order to remove irrelevant translations produced by the transitive translation, we propose a new disambiguation technique, in which two stages of refinement of query translation are executed. Basically, this refinement is based on the idea of pseudo relevance feedback. Our experimental results show that the two-stage refinement method is able to significantly improve search performance of bilingual IR using a pivot language.