Providing multi-lingual searching of mono-lingual content

• US 9,792,367 B2
• Filed: 07/14/2016
• Issued: 10/17/2017
• Est. Priority Date: 07/06/2012
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Kyndryl Incorporated
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Caskey, Sasha P., Hamilton, II, Rick A., Kanevsky, Dimitri, Sainath, Tara N.
• Primary Examiner(s): Opsasnick, Michael N
• Application Number:
  US15/210,326
• Publication Number:
  US 20160321361A1
• Time in Patent Office: 460 Days
• Field of Search: 704 2, 704 8
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/3337 Translation of the query language, e.g. Chinese to English
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/953 Querying, e.g. by the use of web search engines
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/129 Handling non-Latin characters, e.g. kana-to-kanji conversion
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/263 Language identification
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/58 Use of machine translation, e.g. for multi-lingual retrieval, for server-side translation for client devices or for real-time translation

Abstract

Approaches for translating a transliterated search query are provided. An approach includes receiving a search query containing a transliterated word. The approach also includes determining a source language corresponding to the transliterated word. The approach further includes converting the transliterated word to a word in the source language. The approach additionally includes translating the word in the source language to a word in a target language. The approach also includes performing a search using the word in the target language.

Claims

1. A system implemented in hardware, comprising:

a computer system comprising a processor executing a translation engine that is configured to;

receive a search query containing one or more transliterated words;

determine a source language corresponding to a particular transliterated word of the one or more transliterated words, wherein the determining the source language is based solely on the particular transliterated word, wherein the determining the source language comprises;

determining a weighted score for each one of a plurality of candidate languages, and designating the candidate language with the highest weighted score as the source language;

convert the particular transliterated word to a word in the source language;

translate the word in the source language to a word in a target language;

submit the word in the target language to an Internet search engine;

receive search results in the target language, wherein the search results are based on the submitting the word in the target language to the Internet search engine;

translate the search results, received from the Internet search engine, in the target language to search results in the source language; and

displaying the search results in the source language.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the converting the particular transliterated word to the word in the source language is based on visually analogous transliteration that comprises comparing a shape of a letter in the particular transliterated word to shapes of letters in the determined source language.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the weighted score for each one of the plurality of candidate languages is based on:

correlating user-entered words against language-specific dictionaries; and

environmental variables.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein the weighted score for each one of the plurality of candidate languages is based on:

correlating user-entered words against language-specific dictionaries; and

location-based services.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein the weighted score for each one of the plurality of candidate languages is based on:

correlating user-entered words against language-specific dictionaries; and

user profile and/or history.

6. The system of claim 1, wherein the determining the source language is performed automatically without a user specifying the source language.

7. The system of claim 1, wherein the converting the particular transliterated word to the word in the source language is based on visually analogous transliteration.

8. The system of claim 7, wherein the visually analogous transliteration comprises comparing a shape of a letter of the particular transliterated word to a shape of a letter in the source language.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein the converting the particular transliterated word to the word in the source language is based on a combination of visually analogous transliteration and phonetically analogous transliteration.