MorphoSaurus--design and evaluation of an interlingua-based, cross-language document retrieval engine for the medical domain.

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: We propose an interlingua-based indexing approach to account for the particular challenges that arise in the design and implementation of cross-language document retrieval systems for the medical domain. METHODS: Documents, as well as queries, are mapped to a language-independent conceptual layer on which retrieval operations are performed. We contrast this approach with the direct translation of German queries to English ones which, subsequently, are matched against English documents. RESULTS: We evaluate both approaches, interlingua-based and direct translation, on a large medical document collection, the OHSUMED corpus. A substantial benefit for interlingua-based document retrieval using German queries on English texts is found, which amounts to 93% of the (monolingual) English baseline. CONCLUSIONS: Most state-of-the-art cross-language information retrieval systems translate user queries to the language(s) of the target documents. In contra-distinction to this approach, translating both documents and user queries into a language-independent, concept-like representation format is more beneficial to enhance cross-language retrieval performance.