Preliminary study into query translation for patent retrieval

TY - CHAP

T1 - Preliminary study into query translation for patent retrieval

AU - Jochim, Charles

AU - Lioma, Christina

AU - Schütze, Hinrich

AU - Koch, Steffen

AU - Ertl, Thomas

N1 - Conference code: 3

PY - 2010

Y1 - 2010

N2 - Patent retrieval is a branch of Information Retrieval (IR) aiming to support patent professionals in retrieving patents that satisfy their information needs. Often, patent granting bodies require patents to be partially translated into one or more major foreign languages, so that language boundaries do not hinder their accessibility. This multilingual-ity of patent collections offers opportunities for improving patent retrieval. In this work we exploit these opportunities by applying query translation to patent retrieval. We expand monolingual patent queries with their translations, using both a domain-specific patent dictionary that we extract from the patent collection, and a general domain-free dictionary. Experimental evaluation on a standard CLEF-IP dataset shows that using either translation dictionary fetches similar results: query translation can help patent retrieval, but not always, and without great improvement compared to standard statistical monolingual query expansion (Rocchio). The improvement is greater when the source language is English, as opposed to French or German, a finding partly due to the effect of the complex French and German morphology upon translation accuracy, but also partly due to the prevalence of English in the collection. A thorough per-query analysis reveals that cases where standard query expansion fails (e.g. zero recall) can benefit from query translation.

AB - Patent retrieval is a branch of Information Retrieval (IR) aiming to support patent professionals in retrieving patents that satisfy their information needs. Often, patent granting bodies require patents to be partially translated into one or more major foreign languages, so that language boundaries do not hinder their accessibility. This multilingual-ity of patent collections offers opportunities for improving patent retrieval. In this work we exploit these opportunities by applying query translation to patent retrieval. We expand monolingual patent queries with their translations, using both a domain-specific patent dictionary that we extract from the patent collection, and a general domain-free dictionary. Experimental evaluation on a standard CLEF-IP dataset shows that using either translation dictionary fetches similar results: query translation can help patent retrieval, but not always, and without great improvement compared to standard statistical monolingual query expansion (Rocchio). The improvement is greater when the source language is English, as opposed to French or German, a finding partly due to the effect of the complex French and German morphology upon translation accuracy, but also partly due to the prevalence of English in the collection. A thorough per-query analysis reveals that cases where standard query expansion fails (e.g. zero recall) can benefit from query translation.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=78651321609&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/1871888.1871899

DO - 10.1145/1871888.1871899

M3 - Book chapter

AN - SCOPUS:78651321609

SP - 57

EP - 66

BT - Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Patent information retrieval

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

T2 - 3rd International Workshop on Patent Information Retrieval

Y2 - 26 October 2010 through 26 October 2010

ER -