The Creation of an English-Arabic Cross-Language Information Retrieval Environment

An English-Arabic Cross-Language Information Retrieval Environment was created in which the user can query an Arabic database in English and retrieve a set of relevant Arabic documents. The retrieved Arabic documents will be automatically translated into English to facilitate readability by the English language user. Proper names of people, places, and organizations are extracted from the retrieved documents and transliterated from Arabic into English. They are presented to the user and serve to provide a brief summarization of the retrieved document. Another feature of the AIR design is the user’s ability to group searches and search results into what we call Topics which persist between sessions and can be managed by the individual user. The guiding principle in the AIR system is to get away from the English query as soon as possible and rely on relevance feedback to refine the Arabic version of the query, thereby providing the user with helpful information as quickly as possible. High precision query translation comes from the combination of different lexical resources to improve translation probabilities of initial query terms, and also to provide high-quality data fo