Resolving query translation ambiguity using a decaying co-occurrence model and syntactic dependency relations

Bilingual dictionaries have been commonly used for query translation in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). However, we are faced with the problem of translation selection. Several recent studies suggested the utilization of term cooccurrences in this selection. This paper presents two extensions to improve them. First, we extend the basic co-occurrence model by adding a decaying factor that decreases the mutual information when the distance between the terms increases. Second, we incorporate a triple translation model, in which syntactic dependence relations (represented as triples) are integrated. Our evaluation on translation accuracy shows that translating triples as units is more precise than a word-by-word translation. Our CLIR experiments show that the addition of the decaying factor leads to substantial improvements of the basic co-occurrence model; and the triple translation model brings further improvements.