Abstract
In this work, we investigate machine translation (MT) of search queries in the context of cross-lingual information retrieval (IR) in the domain of medicine. The main focus is on MT adaptation techniques to increase translation quality, however we also explore MT adaptation to improve cross-lingual IR directly.
The experiments described herein have been performed and thoroughly evaluated for MT quality on the datasets created within the Khresmoi project and for IR performance on the CLEF eHealth 2013 datasets on three language pairs: Czech-English, German-English, and French-English. The search query translation results achieved in our experiments are outstanding - our systems outperformed not only our strong baselines, but also the Google Translate and Microsoft Bing Translator in direct comparison carried out on all the language pairs.
In terms of the retrieval performance on this particular test collection, a significant improvement over the baseline has been achieved only for French-English. Throu