Cross-Lingual Information Retrieve in Sogou Search

Jingfang Xu, Feifei Zhai, Zhengshan Xue

Abstract: In recent years, more and more Chinese people desires to be able to access the large amount of foreign language information and understand what is happening all over the world. However, language barrier is always a problem to them. In order to break the language barrier and connect Chinese people to the foreign language information in the world, Sogou has built a cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) system named Sogou English (http://english.sogou.com), which enables Chinese people to search and browse foreign language information with Chinese. In Sogou English, when the user inputs a Chinese query, it will first translate the Chinese query into English, and then search over the Internet, and finally translate the search results into Chinese so that users can understand them better. Hence with Sogou English, people can read and browse the information from English world without actually knowing English.