Addressing the lack of direct translation resources for cross-language retrieval

Most cross language information retrieval research concentrates on language pairs for which direct, rich, and often multiple translation resources already exist. However, for most language pairs, translation via an intermediate language is necessary. Two distinct methods for dealing with the additional ambiguity introduced by the extra translation step have been proposed and individually, shown to improve retrieval effectiveness. Two previous works indicated that in combination, the methods were ineffective. This paper provides strong empirical evidence that the methods can be combined to produce consistent and often significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness. The improvement is shown across a number of different intermediate languages and test collections.