# Cross-Language Question Re-Ranking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.01487 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01487/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Cross-Lingual Open-Domain Question Answering with Answer Sentence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07150/) (2021)
- [Multilingual Answer Sentence Reranking via Automatically Translated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10250/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Advantages of Interactive and Non-Interactive Models for Vector-Based Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01992/) (2021)
- [Cross-language Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05988/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study how to find relevant questions in community forums when the language of the new questions is different from that of the existing questions in the forum. In particular, we explore the Arabic-English language pair. We compare a kernel-based system with a feed-forward neural network in a scenario where a large parallel corpus is available for training a machine translation system, bilingual dictionaries, and cross-language word embeddings. We observe that both approaches degrade the performance of the system when working on the translated text, especially the kernel-based system, which depends heavily on a syntactic kernel. We address this issue using a cross-language tree kernel, which compares the original Arabic tree to the English trees of the related questions. We show that this kernel almost closes the performance gap with respect to the monolingual system. On the neural network side, we use the parallel corpus to train cross-language embeddings, which we then use to represent the Arabic input and the English related questions in the same space. The results also improve to close to those of the monolingual neural network. Overall, the kernel system shows a better performance compared to the neural network in all cases.