Bilingual Information Retrieval with DesIRe and Internet Translation Services

with DesIRe

and Internet Translation Services

Norbert Gövert

∗

University of Dortmund, Germany

1 Introduction

DesIReistheDortmundextensiblestructuredInformationRetrieval engine 1

. Itsextensi-

bilityisbasedonthe implementationof physicaldata independence; it'squeryinterface

consistsof datatypeswith respective search predicates. This concept enabledus toadd

bilingualsearchpredicatesforthedatatypesText::English andText::German(forEn-

glish and German text, respectively). Our implementation uses free Internet resources

fortranslating topics fromEnglish to Germanand vice versa.

2 Search predicates for bilingual retrieval

Havinga system whichis extensiblew.r.t. datatypesand theirrespectivesearchpredi-

cates wedecided toextend the Text::English and Text::German datatypes by search

predicatsfor bilingualtextretrieval. Thesepredicates needed topeformthe translation

of topics and queries from German to English in case of datatype Text::English and

viceversa in case of datatypeText::German.

For translation of queries we adopted two rather naive, but fully automatic ap-

proaches. In both approaches we used free internetresources:

•

ofAltavista. Thisserviceallows

totranslatepassages in asource language toagiven target language. Besides the

translationfromGermantoEnglishand viceversa, Babelshiscapableofvarious

otherlanguages.

∗

<[email protected]>

1

http://ls6-www.cs.uni-dortmund.de/ir/projects/DesIRe/

2

•

We chose the Leo Dictionary service 3

for this purpose. Leo provides for a En-

glish/German dictionary with about 223900 entries. Translations can be done

in both directions. Since also composed words and phrases are included in the

dictionary, we exploited this by not translating the original topics word-by-word

butbyinterpretingeachtwoneighbouringtermsasphrases. Adoptingarealnaive

approachweeven didn'ttakemeasuresinordertotackletheword disambiguation

problem.

bilingual

search predicate wrapper Internet translation

service tranlated query

source/target language Query

index query result

1

2

3

Figure1: bilingualsearch predicates

Figure 1 shows the general scheme of our search predicates for bilingual text re-

trieval. The user gives the query in a source language, which is translated by means of

a translation wrapper. The task of the wrapper is to give a uniform interface to free

translation resources on the internet: It accepts the query as given by the user plus

sourceand targetlanguage and then handles the translation through the service itwas

implementedfor.

3