Query Translation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval using Multilingual Word Clusters

In Cross-Language Information Retrieval, finding the appropriate translation of the source language query has always been a difficult problem to solve. We propose a technique towards solving this problem with the help of multilingual word clusters obtained from multilingual word embeddings. We use word embeddings of the languages projected to a common vector space on which a community-detection algorithm is applied to find clusters such that words that represent the same concept from different languages fall in the same group. We utilize these multilingual word clusters to perform query translation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval for three languages English, Hindi and Bengali. We have experimented with the FIRE 2012 and Wikipedia datasets and have shown improvements over several standard methods like dictionarybased method, a transliteration-based model and Google Translate.