A study of user profile representation for personalized cross-language information retrieval

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.