Cross-Language Information Retrieval Based on Category Matching Between Language Versions of a Web Directory

Since the Web consists of documents in various domains or genres, the method for Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) of Web documents should be in-dependent of a particular domain. In this paper, we propose a CLIR method which employs a Web directory provided in mul-tiple language versions (such as Yahoo!). In the proposed method, feature terms are first extracted from Web documents for each category in the source and the tar-get languages. Then, one or more corre-sponding categories in another language are determined beforehand by comparing similarities between categories across lan-guages. Using these category pairs, we in-tend to resolve ambiguities of simple dic-tionary translation by narrowing the cat-egories to be retrieved in the target lan-guage.