Summarization Design for Interactive Cross-Language Question Answering

Abstract. This paper describes an experimental investigation of interactive techniques for cross-language information access. The task was to answer factual questions from a large collection of documents written in a language in which the user has little proficiency. An interactive cross-language retrieval system that included optional user-assisted query translation, display of translated summaries for individual document ranked in order of decreasing degree of match to the user’s query, and optional full-text examination of individual documents was provided. Two alternative types of extractive summaries were tried using a systematically varied presentation order, one drawn from a single segment of the translated document and the other drawn from three (usually) shorter segments of the translated document. On average, users were able to correctly answer just 62% of the sixteen assigned questions in an average of 176 seconds per question. Little difference was found between the two...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: CLEF
• Authors: Daqing He, Jianqiang Wang, Jun Luo, Douglas W. Oard
• Keywords: CLEF 2004, Individual Documents, Interactive Cross-language Retrieval, Optional User-assisted Query