Search for information is no longer exclusively limited within the native language of the user
but is more and more extended to other languages. This gives rise to the problem of
cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) whose goal is to find relevant information written
in a different language to a query. In addition to the problems of monolingual information
retrieval (IR) translation is the key problem in CLIR: one should translate either the query
or the documents from a language to another. However this translation problem is not identical
to full-text machine translation (MT): the goal is not to produce a human-readable translation
but a translation suitable for finding relevant documents. Specific translation methods are
thus required. The goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive description of the specific
problems arising in CLIR the solutions proposed in this area as well as the remaining
problems. The book starts with a general description of the monolingual IR and CLIR problems.
Different classes of approaches to translation are then presented: approaches using an MT
system dictionary-based translation and approaches based on parallel and comparable corpora.
In addition the typical retrieval effectiveness using different approaches is compared. It
will be shown that translation approaches specifically designed for CLIR can rival and
outperform high-quality MT systems. Finally the book offers a look into the future that draws
a strong parallel between query expansion in monolingual IR and query translation in CLIR
suggesting that many approaches developed in monolingual IR can be adapted to CLIR. The book
can be used as an introduction to CLIR. Advanced readers can also find more technical details
and discussions about the remaining research challenges in the future. It is suitable to new
researchers who intend to carry out research on CLIR. Table of Contents: Preface Introduction
Using Manually Constructed Translation Systems and Resources for CLIR Translation Based on
Parallel and Comparable Corpora Other Methods to Improve CLIR A Look into the Future:
Toward a Unified View of Monolingual IR and CLIR? References Author Biography
