The existing studies in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) mostly rely on general text representation models (e.g., vector space model or latent semantic analysis). These models are not optimized for the target retrieval task. In this paper, we follow the success of neural representation in natural language processing (NLP) and develop a novel text representation model based on adversarial learning, which seeks a task-specific embedding space for CLIR. Adversarial learning is implemented as an interplay between the generator process and the discriminator process. In order to adapt adversarial learning to CLIR, we design three constraints to direct representation learning, which are (1) a matching constraint capturing essential characteristics of cross-language ranking, (2) a translation constraint bridging language gaps, and (3) an adversarial constraint forcing both language and media invariant to be reached more efficiently and effectively. Through the joint exploitation of these constraints in an adversarial manner, the underlying cross-language semantics relevant to retrieval tasks are better preserved in the embedding space. Standard CLIR experiments show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art continuous space models and is better than the strong machine translation baseline.

Recently, a significant number of studies have focused on neural information retrieval (IR) models. One category of works use unlabeled data to train general word embeddings based on term proximity, which can be integrated into traditional IR models. The other category employs labeled data (e.g. click-through data) to train end-to-end neural IR models consisting of layers for target-specific representation learning. The latter idea accounts better for the IR task and is favored by recent research works, which is the one we will follow in this paper. We hypothesize that general semantics learned from unlabeled data can complement task-specific representation learned from labeled data of limited quality, and that a combination of the two is favorable. To this end, we propose a learning framework which can benefit from both labeled and more abundant unlabeled data for representation learning in the context of IR. Through a joint learning fashion in a single neural framework, the learned representation is optimized to minimize both the supervised loss on query-document matching and the unsupervised loss on text reconstruction. Standard retrieval experiments on TREC collections indicate that the joint learning methodology leads to significant better performance of retrieval over several strong baselines for IR.