Applying a Hybrid Query Translation Method to
Japanese/English CrossLanguage Patent Retrieval

Masatoshi Fukui y Shigeto Higuchi y Youichi Nakatani y
Masao Tanaka y Atsushi Fujii z Tetsuya Ishikawa z
y Japan Patent Information Organization
Satoh Daiya Bldg., 17 Toyo 4Chome Kotoku 1350016, JAPAN
z University of Library and Information Science
12 Kasuga Tsukuba 3058550, JAPAN
Email: fujii@ulis.ac.jp

Abstract
This paper applies an existing query translation 
method to crosslanguage patent retrieval. 
In our method, multiple dictionaries 
are used to derive all possible translations 
for an input query, and collocational
statistics are used to resolve translation ambiguity. 
We used Japanese/English parallel
patent abstracts to perform comparative experiments, 
where our method outperformed a simple 
dictionary-based query translation method,
and achieved 76% of monolingual retrieval in
terms of average precision.


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