Patent Document ID: 7917488
Application ID: 12041629

Base Claim:
1. One or more computer readable media having stored thereupon a plurality of instructions that, when executed by a processor, cause the processor to perform the following actions: retrieving a first set of documents in a first language and a second set of documents in a second language via a cross-lingual search query that is based on a search query written in the first language; for each document of the first set and the second set of documents, computing a value of a unified ranking function that is a function of the search query and a corresponding document, the unified ranking function comprising a term descriptive of a cross-lingual query generative probability between the search query and the corresponding document, the cross-lingual query generative probability being a summation calculated based on a term descriptive of a probability of translating the search query from the first language to the second language and a term descriptive of a monolingual query generative probability of the search query being in the second language given an observation of a document in the second language; and ranking the first set of documents and the second set of documents together based on the values of the unified ranking function.

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Claim 11:
11. The one or more computer readable media of claim 1 , wherein the unified ranking function is expressed in terms comprising: ψ ⁢ ( q c , d ) = { ∑ i ⁢ λ i ⁢ f i ⁡ ( q c , d c ) if ⁢ ⁢ d ⁢ ⁢ is ⁢ ⁢ d c ∑ i , j ⁢ μ ij ⁢ f i ⁡ ( q e , d e ) ⁢ g j ⁡ ( q c , q e ) + ∑ i , k ⁢ π ik ⁢ f i ⁡ ( q c , d c ) ⁢ h k ⁡ ( d c , d e ) if ⁢ ⁢ d ⁢ ⁢ is ⁢ ⁢ d e , where ranking function ψ(q c ,d) is a function of the search query q c and document d of the first set and the second set of documents; document d e is one of the second set of documents in the second language; λ i is corresponding weight; q e is a translation of the search query q c in the second language; ƒ i (q e ,d e ) is a monolingual relevancy feature function used for estimating relevancy between q e as a search query in the second language and the document d e ; g j (q c ,q e ) is a feature function associated with query translation between the search query q c and the translation search query q e ; μ ij is corresponding weight parameter; d c is a translation of the document d e in the first language; ƒ i (q c ,d c ) is a monolingual relevancy feature function used for estimating relevancy between the search query q c and the translation document d c ; h k (d c ,d e ) is a feature function associated with document translation between the translation document d c and the document d e ; and h ij is corresponding weight parameter, and i is a first index that represents at least one ƒ i (q e ,d e ) and ƒ i (q c ,d c ), j is a second index that represents at least one g j (q c ,q e ), k is a third index that represents at least one h k (d c ,d e ).