Abstract: 【Purpose/significance】The purpose of cross-language information retrieval research is to eliminate the difficulty of infor⁃mation query caused by language differences, and improve the efficiency of finding specific information from a large number of com⁃plex. It also provides a more convenient way for users to retrieve documents in another language in a language they are familiar with.【Method/process】In this paper, through analyzing the current research of cross-language information retrieval, introduces the several kinds of query translation methods, including: direct query translation, document translation, intermediate language translation and query, the method of literature translation, and on the comparison of the effect, and then expounds the cross-language retrieval key technologies, the use of bilingual dictionaries, corpus, based machine translation technology to produce ambiguity solution and evalua⁃tion.【Result/conclusion】To use natural language processing technology, the co-occurrence technology, relevant feedback technology,extension, two-way translation technology and information retrieval based on ontology technology to ensure that the knowledge diction⁃ary coverage and ambiguity processing, through analyzing cross-language retrieval experiments prove that the knowledge dictionary and corpus and search engine combination can improve query efficiency.【Innovation/limitation】In order to solve the problem of the lack of words in dictionaries and corpora for cross-language information retrieval, this paper puts forward the problem of the lack of sentence pairs in the corpus by using search engines to obtain information resources from web pages. This paper mainly discusses the problems of Chinese and English information retrieval, and the solutions need to be further studied, such as the difficulty of Chinese
word segmentation and the low dictionary coverage rate, which seriously affect the efficiency of retrieval.