This paper explores a novel technique for improving recall in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) systems using iterative query refinement grounded in the user's lexical-semantic space. The proposed methodology combines multi-level translation, semantic embedding-based expansion, and user profile-centered augmentation to address the challenge of matching variance between user queries and relevant documents. Through an initial BM25 retrieval, translation into intermediate languages, embedding lookup of similar terms, and iterative re-ranking, the technique aims to expand the scope of potentially relevant results personalized to the individual user. Comparative experiments on news and Twitter datasets demonstrate superior performance over baseline BM25 ranking for the proposed approach across ROUGE metrics. The translation methodology also showed maintained semantic accuracy through the multi-step process. This personalized CLIR framework paves the path for improved context-aware retrieval attentive to the nuances of user language.

Two key assumptions shape the usual view of ranked retrieval: (1) that the searcher can choose words for their query that might appear in the documents that they wish to see, and (2) that ranking retrieved documents will suffice because the searcher will be able to recognize those which they wished to find. When the documents to be searched are in a language not known by the searcher, neither assumption is true. In such cases, Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) is needed. This chapter reviews the state of the art for cross-language information retrieval and outlines some open research questions.

The field of information retrieval and text manipulation (classification, clustering) still strives for models allowing semantic information to be folded in to improve performance with respect to standard bag-of-word based models. Many approaches aim at a concept-based retrieval, but differ in the nature of the concepts, which range from linguistic concepts as defined in lexical resources such as WordNet, latent topics derived from the data itself—as in Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) or (Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)—to Wikipedia articles as proxies for concepts, as in the recently proposed Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) model. A crucial question which has not been answered so far is whether models based on explicitly given concepts (as in the ESA model for instance) perform inherently better than retrieval models based on "latent" concepts (as in LSI and/or LDA). In this paper we investigate this question closer in the context of a cross-language setting, which inherently requires concept-based retrieval bridging between different languages. In particular, we compare the recently proposed ESA model with two latent models (LSI and LDA) showing that the former is clearly superior to the both. From a general perspective, our results contribute to clarifying the role of explicit vs. implicitly derived or latent concepts in (cross-language) information retrieval research.