TY  - JOUR
AB  - Purpose– With an increase in the amount of multilingual content on the World Wide Web, users are often striving to access information provided in a language of which they are non-native speakers. The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive study of user profile representation techniques and investigate their use in personalized cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) systems through the means of personalized query expansion. Design/methodology/approach– The user profiles consist of weighted terms computed by using frequency-based methods such as tf-idf and BM25, as well as various latent semantic models trained on monolingual documents and cross-lingual comparable documents. This paper also proposes an automatic evaluation method for comparing various user profile generation techniques and query expansion methods. Findings– Experimental results suggest that latent semantic-weighted user profile representation techniques are superior to frequency-based methods, and are particularly suitable for users with a sufficient amount of historical data. The study also confirmed that user profiles represented by latent semantic models trained on a cross-lingual level gained better performance than the models trained on a monolingual level. Originality/value– Previous studies on personalized information retrieval systems have primarily investigated user profiles and personalization strategies on a monolingual level. The effect of utilizing such monolingual profiles for personalized CLIR remains unclear. The current study fills the gap by a comprehensive study of user profile representation for personalized CLIR and a novel personalized CLIR evaluation methodology to ensure repeatable and controlled experiments can be conducted.
VL  - 68
IS  - 4
SN  - 2050-3806
DO  - 10.1108/AJIM-06-2015-0091
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-06-2015-0091
AU  - Zhou Dong
AU  - Lawless Séamus
AU  - Wu Xuan
AU  - Zhao Wenyu
AU  - Liu Jianxun
PY  - 2016
Y1  - 2016/01/01
TI  - A study of user profile representation for personalized cross-language information retrieval
T2  - Aslib Journal of Information Management
PB  - Emerald Group Publishing Limited
SP  - 448
EP  - 477
Y2  - 2024/04/25
ER  -