Handling Noisy queries in cross language FAQ retrieval

Recent times have seen a tremendous growth in mobile based data services that allow people to use Short Message Service (SMS) to access these data services. In a multilingual society it is essential that data services that were developed for a specific language be made accessible through other local languages also. In this paper, we present a service that allows a user to query a Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQ) database built in a local language (Hindi) using Noisy SMS English queries. The inherent noise in the SMS queries, along with the language mismatch makes this a challenging problem. We handle these two problems by formulating the query similarity over FAQ questions as a combinatorial search problem where the search space consists of combinations of dictionary variations of the noisy query and its top-N translations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a real-life dataset. © 2010 Association for Computational Linguistics.