English

The Cross-Lingual Arabic Information REtrieval (CLAIRE) System

Information Retrieval 2021-07-30 v1

Abstract

Despite advances in neural machine translation, cross-lingual retrieval tasks in which queries and documents live in different natural language spaces remain challenging. Although neural translation models may provide an intuitive approach to tackle the cross-lingual problem, their resource-consuming training and advanced model structures may complicate the overall retrieval pipeline and reduce users engagement. In this paper, we build our end-to-end Cross-Lingual Arabic Information REtrieval (CLAIRE) system based on the cross-lingual word embedding where searchers are assumed to have a passable passive understanding of Arabic and various supporting information in English is provided to aid retrieval experience. The proposed system has three major advantages: (1) The usage of English-Arabic word embedding simplifies the overall pipeline and avoids the potential mistakes caused by machine translation. (2) Our CLAIRE system can incorporate arbitrary word embedding-based neural retrieval models without structural modification. (3) Early empirical results on an Arabic news collection show promising performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2107.13751,
  title  = {The Cross-Lingual Arabic Information REtrieval (CLAIRE) System},
  author = {Zhizhong Chen and Carsten Eickhoff},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.13751},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T04:37:41.322Z