Mixed Language Query Disambiguation

Mixed Language Query Disambiguation Pascale FUNG, LIU Xiaohu and CHEUNG Chi Shun HKUST Human Language Technology Center Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering University of Science and Technology, HKUST Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong {pascale, Ixiaohu, eepercy}@ee, ust. hk Abstract We propose a mixed language query disam- biguation approach by using co-occurrence in- formation from monolingual data only. A mixed language query consists of words in a primary language and a secondary language. Our method translates the query into mono- lingual queries in either language. Two novel features for disambiguation, namely contextual word voting and 1-best contextual word, are in- troduced and compared to a baseline feature, the nearest neighbor. Average query transla- tion accuracy for the two features are 81.37% and 83.72%, compared to the baseline accuracy of 75.50%. 1 Introduction Online information retrieval is now prevalent because of the ubiquitous World Wide Web. The Web is also a powerful platform for another application--interactive spoken language query systems. Traditionally, such systems were im- plemented on stand-alone kiosks. Now we can easily use the Web as a platform. Information such as airline schedules, movie reservation, car trading, etc., can all be included in HTML files, to be accessed by a generic spoken interface to the Web browser (Zue, 1995; DiDio, 1997; Ray- mond, 1997; Fung et al., 1998a). Our team has built a multilingual spoken language inter- face to the Web, named SALSA (Fung et al., 1998b; Fung et al., 1998a; Ma and Fung, 1998). Users can use speech to surf the net via vari- ous links as well as issue search commands such as "Show me the latest movie of Jacky Chan'. The system recognizes commands and queries in English, Mandarin and Cantonese, as well as mixed language sentences. Until recently, most of the search engines han- dle keyword based queries where the user types in a series of strings without syntactic structure. The choice of key words in this case determines the success rate of the search. In many situa- tions, the key words are ambiguous. To resolve ambiguity, query expansion is usu- ally employed to look for additional keywords. We believe that a more useful search engine should allow the user to input natural lan- guage sentences. Sentence-based queries are useful because (1) they are more natural to the user and (2) more importantly, they provide more contextual information which are impor- tant for query understanding. To date, the few sentence-based search engines do not seem to take advantage of context information in the query, but merely extracting key words from the query sentence (AskJeeves, 1998; ElectricMonk, 1998). In addition to the need for better query un- derstanding methods for a large variety of do- mains, it has also become important to han- dle queries in different languages. Cross- language information retrieval has emerged as an important area as the amount of non- English material is ever increasing (Oard, 1997; Grefenstette, 1998; Ballesteros and Croft, 1998; Picchi and Peters, 1998; Davis, 1998; Hull and Grefenstette, 1996). One …

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