Comparative Study of Monolingual and Multilingual Search Models for Use with Asian Languages

Based on the NTCIR-4 test-collection, our first objective is to present an overview of the retrieval effectiveness of nine vector-space and two probabilistic models that perform monolingual searches in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English languages. Our second goal is to analyze the relative merits of the various automated and freely available toolsto translate the English-language topics into Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, and then submit the resultant query in order to retrieve pertinent documents written in one of the three Asian languages. We also demonstrate how bilingual searches could be improved by applying both the combined query translation strategies and data-fusion approaches. Finally, we address basic problems related to multilingual searches, in which queries written in English are used to search documents written in the English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages.