Patent ID: 8909511

Claim:
A bilingual information retrieval apparatus comprising: an input text acquisition unit that acquires input text in a first language; a first memory that stores a plurality of pieces of first language construct information indicating a construct of text in the first language, each of the plurality of pieces of first language construct information including a fixed item indicating a fixed character string in the text and a variable item indicating a variable character string in the text; a first language construct information selection unit that selects a piece of first language construct information corresponding to the input text from among the plurality of pieces of stored first language construct information; a second memory that stores a plurality of pieces of second language construct information indicating a construct of text in a second language corresponding to the selected piece of first language construct information, each of the plurality of pieces of second language construct information including a fixed item indicating a fixed character string in the text and a variable item indicating a variable character string in the text; and a second language construct information selection unit that selects a piece of second language construct information from among the plurality of pieces of second language construct information stored in the second memory on the basis of evaluation information associated with the plurality of pieces of first language construct information and the plurality of pieces of second language construct information, wherein the evaluation information comprises plural pieces of evaluation information with respect to each of the plurality of pieces of second language construct information, wherein the second language construct information selection unit generates the plural pieces of evaluation information respectively based on plural evaluation criteria, and selects a piece of second language construct information from among the plurality of pieces of second language construct information based on the generated plural pieces of the evaluation information, and wherein the second language construct information selection unit determines a plurality of pieces of representative evaluation information, respectively corresponding to the plurality of pieces of second language construct information, based on a weighted sum of the generated plural pieces of the evaluation information with respect to each of the plurality of pieces of second language construct information, and selects a piece of second language construct information from among the plurality of pieces of second language construct information based on the plurality of pieces of representative evaluation information.