Query Translation for Cross-lingual Search in the Academic Search Engine PubPsych

We describe a lexical resource-based process for query translation of a domain-specific and multilingual academic search engine in psychology, PubPsych. PubPsych queries are diverse in language with a high amount of informational queries and technical terminology. We present an approach for translating queries into English, German, French, and Spanish. We build a quadrilingual lexicon with aligned terms in the four languages using MeSH, Wikipedia and Apertium as our main resources. Our results show that using the quadlexicon together with some simple translation rules, we can automatically translate 85% of translatable tokens in PubPsych queries with mean adequacy over all the translatable text of 1.4 when measured on a 3-point scale [0,1,2].