Implicit ambiguity resolution using incremental clustering in cross-language information retrieval

This paper presents a method to implicitly resolve ambiguities using dynamic incremental clustering in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) such as Korean-to-English and Japanese-to-English CLIR. The main objective of this paper shows that document clusters can effectively resolve the ambiguities tremendously increased in translated queries as well as take into account the context of all the terms in a document. In the framework we propose, a query in Korean/Japanese is first translated into English by looking up bilingual dictionaries, then documents are retrieved for the translated query terms based on the vector space retrieval model or the probabilistic retrieval model. For the top-ranked retrieved documents, query-oriented document clusters are incrementally created and the weight of each retrieved document is re-calculated by using the clusters. In the experiment based on TREC CLIR test collection, our method achieved 39.41% and 36.79% improvement for translated queries without ambiguity resolution in Korean-to-English CLIR, and 17.89% and 30.46% improvements in Japanese-to-English CLIR, on the vector space retrieval and on the probabilistic retrieval, respectively. Our method achieved 12.30% improvement for all translation queries, compared with blind feedback for the probabilistic retrieval in Korean-to-English CLIR. These results indicate that cluster analysis helps to resolve ambiguity.