| Abstract | Cross-language retrieval systems seek to use queries in one natural language to guide theretrieval of documents that might be written in another. Acquisition and representation
of translation knowledge plays a central role in this process. This paper explores the util-
ity of two sources of manually encoded translation knowledge, bilingual dictionaries and
translation lexicons, for cross-language retrieval. We have implemented six query trans-
lation techniques that use bilingual dictionaries, one based on lexical-semantic analysis,
and one based on direct use of the translation output from an existing machine transla-
tion system; these are compared with a document translation technique that uses output
from the same existing translation system. Average precision measures on portions of the
TREC collection suggest that arbitrarily selecting a single translation from a bilingual
dictionary is typically no less effective than using every translation in the dictionary,
that query translation using an existing machine translation system can achieve some-
what better effectiveness than simple dictionary-based techniques, and that performing
document translation rather than query translation may result in further improvements
in retrieval effectiveness under some conditions.
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