This paper introduces a general framework for the use of translation probabilities in cross-language information retrieval based on the notion that information retrieval fundamentally requires matching what the searcher means with what the author of a document meant. That perspective yields a computational formulation that provides a natural way of combining what have been known as query and document translation. Two well-recognized techniques are shown to be a special case of this model under restrictive assumptions. Cross-language search results are reported that are statistically indistinguishable from strong monolingual baselines for both French and Chinese documents.

Test collections model use cases in ways that facilitate evaluation of information retrieval systems. This paper describes the use of search-guided relevance assessment to create a test collection for retrieval of spontaneous conversational speech. Approximately 10,000 thematically coherent segments were manually identified in 625 hours of oral history interviews with 246 individuals. Automatic speech recognition results, manually prepared summaries, controlled vocabulary indexing, and name authority control are available for every segment. Those features were leveraged by a team of four relevance assessors to identify topically relevant segments for 28 topics developed from actual user requests. Search-guided assessment yielded sufficient inter-annotator agreement to support formative evaluation during system development. Baseline results for ranked retrieval are presented to illustrate use of the collection.

No abstract available.

Searching is inherently a user-centered process; people pose the questions for which machines seek answers, and ultimately people judge the degree to which retrieved documents meet their needs. Rapid development of interactive systems that use queries expressed in one language to search documents written in another poses five key challenges: (1) interaction design, (2) query formulation, (3) cross-language search, (4) construction of translated summaries, and (5) machine translation. This article describes the design of MIRACLE, an easily extensible system based on English queries that has previously been used to search French, German, and Spanish documents, and explains how the capabilities of MIRACLE were rapidly extended to accommodate Cebuano and Hindi. Evaluation results for the cross-language search component are presented for both languages, along with results from a brief full-system interactive experiment with Hindi. The article concludes with some observations on directions for further research on interactive cross-language information retrieval.