BRIDJE over a language barrier

Abstract

This paper describes two new features of the BRIDJE system for cross-language information access. The first feature is the partial disambiguation function of the Bi-directional Retriever, which can be used for search request translation in cross-language IR. Its advantage over a "black-box" machine translation approach is consistent across five test collections and across two language permutations: English-Japanese and Japanese-English. The second new feature is the Information Distiller, which performs interactive summarisation of retrieved documents based on Semantic Role Analysis. Our examples illustrate the usefulness of this feature, and our evaluation results show that the precision of Semantic Role Analysis is very high.