Noun phrases as building blocks for cross-language Search Assistance

This paper presents a Foreign-Language Search Assistant that uses noun phrases as fundamental units for document translation and query formulation, translation and refinement. The system (a) supports the foreign-language document selection task providing a cross-language indicative summary based on noun phrase translations, and (b) supports query formulation and refinement using the information displayed in the cross-language document summaries. Our results challenge two implicit assumptions in most of cross-language Information Retrieval research: first, that once documents in the target language are found, Machine Translation is the optimal way of informing the user about their contents; and second, that in an interactive setting the optimal way of formulating and refining the query is helping the user to choose appropriate translations for the query terms.