Abstract

Ordinal regression which is known with learning to rank has long been used in information re- trieval (IR). Learning to rank algorithms, have been tailored in document ranking, information filtering, and building large aligned corpora successfully. In this paper, we propose to use this algorithm for query modeling in cross-language environments. To this end, first we build a query-generated training data using pseudo-relevant documents to the query and all translation candidates. The pseudo-relevant documents are obtained by top-ranked documents in response to a translation of the original query. The class of each candidate in the training data is deter- mined based on presence/absence of the candidate in the pseudo-relevant documents. We learn an ordinal regression model to score the candidates based on their relevance to the context of the query, and after that, we construct a query-dependent translation model using a softmax function. Finally, we re-weight the query based on the obtained model. Experimental results on French, German, Spanish, and Italian CLEF collections demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better results compared to state-of-the-art cross-language information retrieval methods, particu- larly in long queries with large training data.