WikiTranslate: translations using only Wikipedia

WikiTranslate: Query Translation for Cross-lingual Information Retrieval using only Wikipedia

by Dong Nguyen, Arnold Overwijk, Claudia Hauff, Dolf Trieschnigg, Djoerd Hiemstra and Franciska de Jong

This paper presents WikiTranslate, a system which performs query translation for cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) using only Wikipedia to obtain translations. Queries are mapped to Wikipedia concepts and the corresponding translations of these concepts in the target language are used to create the final query. WikiTranslate is evaluated by searching with topics formulated in Dutch, French and Spanish in an English data collection. The system achieved a performance of 67% compared to the monolingual baseline.

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