Cross-language information retrieval

Abstract

AbstractThe article reviews the motivation behind the development of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) – a relatively new area of information retrieval in multilingual textual databases, defines its objectives and position among the research disciplines dealing with various aspects of processing electronic texts. A short historical overview is followed by a description of the most important methodologies (document translation and query translation) and language resources used in connection with them. Regarding the resources, attention is focused on the two- and multilingual ontologies (thesauri, transfer lexicons and similarity thesauri), corpora, their construction and use with the CLIR experiments. The article primarily aims at illustrating the various methodological approaches, while the functioning of particular systems is less prominent. There are no references to the condition of CLIR in Slovenia or to the existence of language resources suitable for processing Slovenian texts in CLIR systems, since this topic calls for a separate review.