This paper presents the evaluation of the translation quality and Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR) performance when using session information as the context of queries. The hypothesis is that previous queries provide context that helps to solve ambiguous translations in the current query. We tested several strategies on the TREC 2010 Session track dataset, which includes query reformulations grouped by generalization, specification, and drifting types. We study the Basque to English direction, evaluating both the translation quality and CLIR performance, with positive results in both cases. The results show that the quality of translation improved, reducing error rate by 12% (HTER) when using session information, which improved CLIR results 5% (nDCG). We also provide an analysis of the improvements across the three kinds of sessions: generalization, specification, and drifting. Translation quality improved in all three types (generalization, specification, and drifting), and CLIR improved for generalization and specification sessions, preserving the performance in drifting sessions.
@InProceedings{SARALEGI16.495,
author = {Xabier Saralegi and Eneko Agirre and Iñaki Alegria}, title = {Evaluating Translation Quality and CLIR Performance of Query Sessions}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper