Cross-language information retrieval with latent topic models trained on a comparable corpus

In this paper we study cross-language information retrieval using a bilingual topic model trained on comparable corpora such as Wikipedia articles. The bilingual Latent Dirichlet Allocation model (BiLDA) creates an interlingual representation, which can be used as a translation resource in many different multilingual settings as comparable corpora are available for many language pairs. The probabilistic interlingual representation is incorporated in a statistical language model for information retrieval. Experiments performed on the English and Dutch test datasets of the CLEF 2001-2003 CLIR campaigns show the competitive performance of our approach compared to cross-language retrieval methods that rely on pre-existing translation dictionaries that are hand-built or constructed based on parallel corpora.