Abstract To support more precise query translation for English-Chinese Bi-Directional Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), we have developed a novel framework by integrating a semantic network to characterize the correlations between multiple inter-related text terms of interest and learn their inter-related statistical query translation models. First, a semantic network is automatically generated from large-scale English-Chinese bilingual parallel corpora to characterize the correlations between a large number of text terms of interest. Second, the semantic network is exploited to learn the statistical query translation models for such text terms of interest. Finally, these inter-related query translation models are used to translate the queries more precisely and achieve more effective CLIR. Our experiments on a large number of official public data have obtained very positive results.