Toward Web mining of cross-language query translations in digital libraries

This paper proposes an effective query-translation approach that enables a cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) service to be more easily supported in digital library systems that only contain monolingual content. A query-translation engine called LiveTrans is used to process the translation requests of cross-lingual queries from connected digital library systems. To automatically extract translations not covered by standard dictionaries, the engine is developed based on a novel integration of dictionary resources and Web mining approaches, including anchor-text and search-result methods. The engine exploits a broad range of multilingual Web resources used as live bilingual corpora to alleviate translation difficulties. It is shown to be particularly effective for extracting multilingual translation equivalents of query terms containing proper names or new terminology. The obtained results show the feasibility of and great potential for creating English-Chinese CLIR services in existing digital libraries and new applications in cross-language Web searching, although difficulties still remain that need to be investigated further.