Comparing User-Assisted and Automatic Query Translation

Abstract

For the 2002 Cross-Language Evaluation Forum Interactive Track, the University of Maryland team focused on query formulation and reformulation. Twelve people performed a total of forty eight searches in the German document collection using English queries. Half of the searches were with user-assisted query translation, and half with fully automatic query translation. For the user-assisted query translation condition, participants were provided two types of cues about the meaning of each translation: a list of other terms with the same translation (potential synonyms), and a sentence in which the word was used in a translation appropriate context. Four searchers performed the official iCLEF task, the other eight searched a smaller collection. Searchers performing the official task were able to make more accurate relevance judgments with user-assisted query translation for three of the four topics. We observed that the number of query iterations seems to vary systematically with topic, system, and collection, and we are analyzing query content and ranked retrieval measures to obtain further insight into these variations in search behavior.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2005
Accession Number
ADA440428

Entities

People

  • Daqing He
  • Douglas W. Oard
  • Jianqiang Wang
  • Michael Nossal

Organizations

  • University of Maryland

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Automatic
  • Data Analysis
  • Dynamic Programming
  • Information Retrieval
  • Iterations
  • Judgment
  • Language
  • Library Science
  • Machine Translation
  • Maps
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Questionnaires
  • Translations
  • Universities
  • User Interface
  • User Interface Engineering

Readers

  • Brain and Cognitive Science; Experimental Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Computational Linguistics