Abstract
Untranslatable query keys pose a problem in dictionary-based cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). One solution consists of using approximate string matching methods for finding the spelling variants of the source key among the target database index. In such a setting, it is important to select a matching method suited especially for CLIR. This paper focuses on comparing the effectiveness of several matching methods in a cross-lingual setting. Search words from five domains were expressed in six languages (French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, and Finnish). The target data consisted of the index of an English full-text database. In this setting, we first established the best method among six baseline matching methods for each language pair. Secondly, we tested novel matching methods based on binary digrams formed of both adjacent and non-adjacent characters of words. The latter methods consistently outperformed all baseline methods.
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Keskustalo, H., Pirkola, A., Visala, K., Leppänen, E., Järvelin, K. (2003). Non-adjacent Digrams Improve Matching of Cross-Lingual Spelling Variants. In: Nascimento, M.A., de Moura, E.S., Oliveira, A.L. (eds) String Processing and Information Retrieval. SPIRE 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2857. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39984-1_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39984-1_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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