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# Query Translation for CLIR: EWC vs. Google Translate

Vitaly Klyuev, Yannis Haralambous

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Vitaly Klyuev, Yannis Haralambous. Query Translation for CLIR: EWC vs. Google Translate. ICIST 2012: IEEE International Conference on Information Science and Technology, Mar 2012, Wuhan, China. pp.707-711, 10.1109/ICIST.2012.6221738. hal-00959927

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# Query Translation for CLIR: EWC vs. Google Translate

V. Klyuev and Y. Haralambous

***Abstract***—A new approach to find accurate translation of search engine queries from Japanese into English for the CLIR task is proposed. The Mecab system and online dictionary SPACEALC are utilized to segment Japanese queries and to get all possible English senses for every term detected. To disambiguate terms, the idea of the shortest path on an oriented graph is applied. Nodes of this graph symbolize word senses and edges connect nodes representing neighboring Japanese terms. The EWC semantic relatedness measure is used to select the most related meanings for the translation results. This measure combines the Wikipedia-based Explicit Semantic Analysis measure, the WordNet path measure and the mixed collocation index. The proposed technique is tested on the NTCIR data collection. Queries generated by Google Translate were used to evaluate the quality of translation.

## I. INTRODUCTION

CROSS-LANGUAGE Information Retrieval (CLIR) can be used to retrieve documents in one language in response to a query given in another. The usual approach consists of two steps: 1) translation of the user query into the target language and then 2) retrieval of documents in this language by using a conventional mono-lingual information retrieval system. There is abundant literature on the CLIR task, using several approaches and different pairs of languages.

Recent findings in information retrieval such as explicit semantic analysis (ESA) introduced in study [2] and ESA combined with WordNet and collocations (EWC) proposed in article [3] allow us to look at the problem from a different angle.

In this paper, we continue to discuss an approach to translate queries for a Japanese-English CLIR task [20]. Our key assumption is as follows: Terms in any query should be semantically related to each other. After segmenting the queries applying different tools, we obtain full sets of translations for each Japanese term. The EWC measure helps us to select appropriate values for each term.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the approaches to the CLIR task. Section 3 describes shortly EWC. Section 4 discusses the proposed technique to translate queries from Japanese into English and to select word meanings. Section 5 describes experiments conducted. Section 6 discusses the results of the tests. Section 7 presents

the concluding remarks.

## II. RELATED WORK

Cross-language information retrieval has a long history. There is a lot of research done in this area. In this section, we review shortly the several studies to show the key current tendencies.

Books [7, 17] and study [6] introduce the key approaches and techniques used in CLIR. The most popular approaches include:

* Machine translation,

* Query translation using bilingual dictionaries,

* Transaction models derived from parallel texts, and

* Similarity thesaurus-based translation.

The main goal of these techniques is to convert the CLIR task into the Ad-hoc retrieval task and then use the methods for the monolingual task to do retrieval.

Bilingual dictionaries do not reflect the dynamic nature of the languages: They do not include the latest words, and phrases appeared in them. This is a main disadvantage of their usage. An approach to use parallel texts from huge volumes in order to obtain a statistical bilingual dictionary became popular. The authors of study [11] applied this approach to the Spanish-English cross-language information retrieval task and achieved improvements in the retrieval results.

Another way to get full translation of the queries is to use advanced translation systems. Google translation was proposed to use in the CLIR task [19]. The authors applied it to the Chinese-English task.

Wikipedia is gaining popularity as a source of knowledge to get translation of terms. Authors of article [8] used it to translate the initial queries into the language of the documents. They tested this approach for queries in Dutch, French, and Spanish and an English data collection. The method proposed in [13] utilized the idea of mapping ESA vectors of the queries with respect to the Wikipedia query space into vectors with respect to the Wikipedia article space. They used the cross-language links of Wikipedia to map the ESA vectors between different languages. This technique was applied to the German - English and French - English language pairs. The authors reported that they did not gain the advantages in the performance compared to the other approaches utilized at CLIR 2008.

Approaches to translate queries do not preserve the semantics of the original queries. This results in the relatively low retrieval performance of the systems utilizing them.

In study [20], an idea of the shortest path on the oriented

V. Klyuev is with the University of Aizu, Aizu-Wakamatsu Fukushima-ken 965-8580, Japan (phone: +81-242-37-2603; fax: +81-242-37-2733; e-mail: vkluev@u-aizu.ac.jp).

Y. Haralambous is with Institut Télécom - Télécom Bretagne, Dép. Informatique, UMR CNRS 3192 Lab-STICC Technopôle Brest Iroise, CS 83818, 29238 Brest Cedex 3, France (e-mail: yannis. haralambous@telecom-bretagne.eu).
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Processing a Japanese query</figcaption></figure>

graph to disambiguate terms was introduced. The nodes of the graph are different meanings of the terms. The authors reported pros and cons of this view. We found this view promising and analyse it in more details.

Next section reviews the technique to find English variants for Japanese queries.

### III. EWC MEASURE DESCRIPTION

In study [3], the new measure of words relatedness is introduced. It combines the ESA measure $\mu_{ESA}$ [2], the ontological WordNet path measure $\mu_{WNP}$ [21], and the collocation index $C_{\xi}$. This measure is called EWC (ESA plus WordNet, plus collocations) and is defined as follows:

$$ \mu_{EWC}(w_1, w_2) = \mu_{ESA}(w_1, w_2) * \alpha $$

$$ \alpha = (1 + \lambda_{\sigma}(\mu_{WNP}(w_1, w_2))) * \gamma $$

$$ \gamma = (1 + \lambda'_{\sigma}(C_{\xi}(w_1, w_2))) $$

where $\lambda_{\sigma}$ weights the WordNet path measure (WNP) with respect to ESA, and $\lambda'_{\sigma}$ weights the mixed collocation index with respect to ESA. This index is defined as follows:

$$ C_{\xi} = \frac{2 * f(w_1, w_2)}{f(w_1) + f(w_2)} + \xi \frac{2 * f(w_2, w_1)}{f(w_1) + f(w_2)} $$

where $f(w_1, w_2)$, $f(w_2, w_1)$ are the frequency of the collocations of $w_1w_2$ and $w_2w_1$ in the corpus, and $f(w_i)$ is the frequency of word $w_i$. The values for constants $\lambda_{\sigma}$, $\lambda'_{\sigma}$, and $\xi$ are set to 5.16, 48.7, and 0.55, respectively.

Study [3] demonstrated the superiority of this measure over ESA on the WS-353 test set. Results of tests on query expansion discussed in study [4] showed superiority of EWC over ESA and DFR (divergence from randomness) term weighting model.

The current implementation of EWC does not take into account Wikipedia articles with titles consisting of multiple terms (they are dimensions in the Wikipedia space). As a result, the proposed technique cannot distinct multiple term
items from collocations and give them the highest score.

## IV. QUERY TRANSLATION

The first step of the technique to translate a Japanese query is segmentation. Individual Japanese terms are the outcome. Mecab [5] and SPACEALC [16] are the tools.

The next step is to translate each term and collect all meanings. SPACEALC is the main tool.

The step, following that, is disambiguation of the meanings of the terms. An unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) system discussed in study [10] is based on the hypothesis that the intended sense of an ambiguous word is related to the words in its context. We use the same hypothesis in the proposed approach. To achieve the goal, we create an oriented graph, which nodes are word senses. Edges connect nodes representing neighboring Japanese terms. The shortest path on this graph gives us the results of query translation. We take into account the all-possible permutations of the terms because the term order in different languages, expressing the same meaning, may be different.

The aforementioned tools Mecab and SPACEALC are key components of our prototype. The other components are an experimental online service to calculate the EWC similarity between translated English terms and software based on the Dijkstra algorithm to select the English variants of translations for each term of the original Japanese query.

Figure 1 illustrates our scheme for processing Japanese queries and obtaining English translations. This scheme is shown for one permutation.

## V. EXPERIMENTS

We chose the open source search engine Terrier [14] as a tool to index and retrieve data. It provides various retrieval approaches. TF-IDF and Okapi's B25 are among them [12]. The NTCIR CLIR data collection [9] consisting of 187,000 articles in English was used as a data set for experiments. These articles are summaries of papers presented at scientific conferences hosted by Japanese academic societies. The collection covers a variety of topics, such as chemistry, electrical engineering, computer science, linguistics, library science, and etc. The size of the collection is about 275.5 MB. 83 topics are in Japanese. We used topics 0001 to 0030. A structure of the dataset and topics is similar to that of TREC [15]. A Porter's stemmer was applied to documents and queries. A standard stop word list provided by Terrier was also utilized. We took into account only the title fields as a source of queries. They are relatively short: Each query consists of a few keywords.

Table 1 presents an original and segmented Japanese query (it consists of three terms; segmentation is done by Mecab), obtained variants of translation from SPACEALC, a generated English query and a query produced by Google Translate, and a query generated as the most appropriate permutation consisting of a combination of terms. The variant with the highest score is selected. A set of analyzed variants is as follows: データ 品質 制御; 品質 データ

制御; データ 制御 品質, etc. The first line in the SPACEALC row corresponds to the first Japanese term; the second line (the term *quality*) is translation of the second Japanese term; and the third one includes senses of the last Japanese term.

In the experiments, we submitted to Terrier 1) queries generated according to the aforementioned technique applying Mecab to segment Japanese texts; 2) queries obtained from Google Translate service; 3) queries generated according to the aforementioned technique applying the

<table><caption>TABLE I
EXAMPLE OF TRANSLATION</caption><thead><tr><td>Procedure</td><td>Query</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Original query</td><td>データ 品質 制御</td></tr><tr><td>Mecab</td><td>データ 品質 制御</td></tr><tr><td>SPACEALC<br>(one permutation)</td><td>data figures information input<br>quality<br>grip regulation</td></tr><tr><td>English query</td><td>information quality regulation</td></tr><tr><td>Google Translate</td><td>data quality control</td></tr></tbody></table>

longest match strategy to segment Japanese texts, 4) queries generated applying Mecab to segment Japanese texts and selecting collocations from the results of translation by SPACEALC, and 5) queries with the highest semantic score.

The longest match technique matches the initial string of characters against the dictionary entries and takes the initial string that matches the longest entry in the dictionary as a word. This technique was introduced in [1]. The longest match strategy was implemented utilizing SPACEALC: The original query was initially submitted to SPACEALC. If SPACEALC failed to translate, we cut the last character from the query and tried to translate it again. In the case of success, we retrieved the all senses for the detected term and repeated this process for the remaining part of the query.

## VI. DISCUSSIONS

Retrieval performance with queries generated utilizing Mecab was very low. See Table 2. The reason for this is as follows: The dictionary of Mecab does not include a big enough number of technical terms. As a result, there is no way to reconstruct the terms (to segment queries) correctly. The accurate segmentation gives the highest possible precision. The technique to detect a variant with the highest possible semantic score does not help much because of the same reason.

Our efforts to reconstruct technical terms and collocations from the information provided on the first page of SPACEALC did not help much: For value of a segmented Japanese term, the first collocation was selected, or the first meaning as a single term. See Table 2, column 6.

The longest match strategy gave the following results: SPACEALC translated successfully full queries without segmentation for topics: 4, 6, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 22, 24, 26, and 28. There were several variants of translations for topics 14 and 22. Results of translation applying Google Translate
<table><caption>TABLE II
RESULTS OF RETRIEVAL</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Queries generated by Google Translate</th><th>Queries generated utilizing the proposed technique and longest much segmentation</th><th>Queries generated utilizing the proposed technique and segmentation by Mecab</th><th>Queries generated utilizing segmentation by Mecab and selection of the bast permutation</th><th>Queries generated utilizing segmentation by Mecab and selection of collocations as values for terms</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Number of queries</td><td>21</td><td>21</td><td>21</td><td>21</td><td>21</td></tr><tr><td>Retrieved</td><td>19087</td><td>18112</td><td>18234</td><td>18000</td><td>19200</td></tr><tr><td>Relevant</td><td>1756</td><td>1756</td><td>1756</td><td>1756</td><td>1756</td></tr><tr><td>Relevant retrieved</td><td>882</td><td>792</td><td>407</td><td>454</td><td>486</td></tr><tr><td>Average Precision</td><td>0.3017</td><td>0.2644</td><td>0.0997</td><td>0.1514</td><td>0.1634</td></tr><tr><td>R Precision</td><td>0.3163</td><td>0.2658</td><td>0.0844</td><td>0.1640</td><td>0.1760</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><caption>TABLE III
ORIGINAL AND THE BEST VARIANTS OF TRANSLATED QUERIES</caption><thead><tr><th>Topic number</th><th>Japanese queries</th><th>Translation by Google Translate</th><th>Translation utilizing the proposed technique and the longest much segmentation</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>ロボット</td><td>Robot</td><td>automaton bot golem iron man robot</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>複合名詞の構造解析</td><td>Structural analysis of compound nouns</td><td>compound noun localization of structures</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>サンプル複雑性</td><td>Sample complexity</td><td>pattern complexity</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>特徴次元リダクション</td><td>Feature dimension reduction</td><td>point plane reduction</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>認知的側面</td><td>Cognitive aspects</td><td>cognitive interface side</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>インターネットトラヒック統計</td><td>Internet traffic statistics</td><td>web traffic side</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>キーワード自動抽出</td><td>Keyword extraction</td><td>keyword automatic extracting</td></tr><tr><td>11</td><td>連結全域グラフ</td><td>Connected spanning graph</td><td>combination entire area graphic</td></tr><tr><td>13</td><td>ループ領域解析</td><td>Analysis of the loop region</td><td>loop region mapping</td></tr><tr><td>16</td><td>最大共通部分グラフ</td><td>Maximal common subgraph</td><td>maximum common substructure graph</td></tr><tr><td>18</td><td>通信品質保証</td><td>Communication quality assurance</td><td>connection quality assurance</td></tr><tr><td>20</td><td>カタカナ外来語</td><td>Katakana foreign words</td><td>katakana loanword</td></tr><tr><td>21</td><td>機械翻訳の評価</td><td>Evaluation of machine translation</td><td>computer interpreter marks</td></tr><tr><td>27</td><td>シソーラスを用いた検索</td><td>Thesaurus search using</td><td>thesaurus search</td></tr><tr><td>29</td><td>位置計測</td><td>Position measurement</td><td>point measuring</td></tr><tr><td>30</td><td>データ駆動画像処理</td><td>Data-driven image processing</td><td>data driving image enhancement</td></tr></tbody></table>

service and SPACEALC were same for topics: 4, 6, 15, 17, 24, 26, and 28. These topics are omitted in Table 3 and Table 4. Table 3 presents the original Japanese queries and variants of translations by Google Translation service and by the proposed technique. Japanese queries initially were segmented utilizing the longest match technique and then they were passed through the procedure of translation. From Table 3, one can see that the proposed approach generates queries similar to queries produced by Google without segmentation done in advance.

Table 4 presents the average precision of each query. The right answers of retrieval are provided by organizers of the NTCIR Workshop only for 21 topics out of 30. N/A marks the topics without right answers. For the queries consisting of only one term, the all senses were selected: SPACEALC does not provide information about the frequency of terms, and terms are arranged in alphabetical order (See Table 3, topic 1).

According to the word frequency list [18], the rank of word robot is equal to 4564. This is the most frequent term compared to “automaton”, “bot”, “golem”, and “iron man”. It seems that Google Translate service uses this information.

One can see from Table 4 that on queries generated according to the proposed technique, the system performed better only on topic 20.

Our experiments showed the superiority of the longest much technique applying SPACEALC over Mecab: Segmentation of Japanese texts is much more accurate. On the other hand, the current implementation of EWC does not take into account Wikipedia articles with titles consisting of multiple terms (they are dimensions in the Wikipedia space). As a result, the proposed technique cannot distinct multiple term items from collocations and give them the highest score. To illustrate this point, we consider the results of segmentation of topic 13 (See Table 3). Applying SPACEALC, we receive two terms with the following
possible values: 1) loop region; looped domain; 2) analysis; deconvolution; mapping; and observational study. There is the entry for the term of observational study in Wikipedia. If we take into account this knowledge, then the result query consisting of loop region observational study and submitted

<table><caption>TABLE IV
AVERAGE PRECISION OF EACH QUERY: BEST VARIANT OF TRANSLATION</caption><thead><tr><th>Topic number</th><th>Precision for the queries generated by Google Translate</th><th>Precision for the queries generated utilizing the proposed technique</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>0.1076</td><td>0.0346</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>0.1997</td><td>0.0001</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>0.5187</td><td>0.3846</td></tr><tr><td>11</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>13</td><td>0.0526</td><td>0.0293</td></tr><tr><td>16</td><td>0.3327</td><td>0.1949</td></tr><tr><td>18</td><td>0.0123</td><td>0.0090</td></tr><tr><td>20</td><td>0.8762</td><td>1.0000</td></tr><tr><td>21</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>27</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>29</td><td>0.1042</td><td>0.0021</td></tr><tr><td>30</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td></tr></tbody></table>

to the search system gives the precision of the retrieval as of 0.3515. This result is much more precise compared to the value of 0.0526 obtained for the query generated by Google Translate service.

As we mentioned earlier, articles of the collection are summaries of papers presented at scientific conferences hosted by Japanese academic societies. Their authors are non-native speakers. This issue may influence the results of retrieval: Topic 10, for example. Google translate generated the query keyword extraction. The proposed technique gave a more accurate variant: keyword automatic extracting. Retrieval results for this topic are better for Google: 0.5187 vs. 0.3846.

The EWC implementation should be enhanced in order to take the aforementioned issues into account. We strongly believe that this feature may improve the accuracy of translation significantly.

## VII. CONCLUSION

The enhancement of the approach to translate short queries from Japanese into English is discussed. It utilizes the EWC measure to calculate the similarity between translated terms, the shortest path idea, and the idea of the best permutation to select terms from the list of candidates. It demonstrated the best performance when the longest match strategy is used. The NTCIR CLIR data collection was used to test the proposed approach. Results of preliminary experiments showed that queries generated are similar to queries obtained from Google Translate service. The performance of the retrieval system for queries generated by the proposed approach is slightly worse compared to the performance for the queries obtained from Google Translate service.

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