Exploiting the web as the multilingual corpus for unknown query translation

Users' cross-lingual queries to a digital library system might be short and the query terms may not be included in a common translation dictionary (unknown terms). In this article, the authors investigate the feasibility of exploiting the Web as the multilingual corpus source to translate unknown query terms for cross-language information retrieval in digital libraries. They propose a Web-based term translation approach to determine effective translations for unknown query terms by mining bilingual search-result pages obtained from a real Web search engine. This approach can enhance the construction of a domain-specific bilingual lexicon and bring multilingual support to a digital library that only has monolingual document collections. Very promising results have been obtained in generating effective translation equivalents for many unknown terms, including proper nouns, technical terms, and Web query terms, and in assisting bilingual lexicon construction for a real digital library system.