Enhancing query translation with relevance feedback in translingual information retrieval

As an effective technique for improving retrieval effectiveness, relevance feedback (RF) has been widely studied in both monolingual and translingual information retrieval (TLIR). The studies of RF in TLIR have been focused on query expansion (QE), in which queries are reformulated before and/or after they are translated. However, RF in TLIR actually not only can help select better query terms, but also can enhance query translation by adjusting translation probabilities and even resolving some out-of-vocabulary terms. In this paper, we propose a novel relevance feedback method called translation enhancement (TE), which uses the extracted translation relationships from relevant documents to revise the translation probabilities of query terms and to identify extra available translation alternatives so that the translated queries are more tuned to the current search. We studied TE using pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) and interactive relevance feedback (IRF). Our results show that TE can significantly improve TLIR with both types of relevance feedback methods, and that the improvement is comparable to that of query expansion. More importantly, the effects of translation enhancement and query expansion are complementary. Their integration can produce further improvement, and makes TLIR more robust for a variety of queries.