Multilingual information access

The global information society has radically changed the way in which know-ledge is acquired, disseminated and exchanged. Users of internationally distributed networks need to be able to find, retrieve and understand relevant information in whatever language and form it may have been stored. For this reason, much attention has been given over the past few years to the study and development of tools and technologies for multilingual information access (MLIA). This is a complex, multidisciplinary area in which methodologies and tools developed in the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing converge. Two main sectors are involved: multiple language recognition, manipulation and display; cross-language search and retrieval. The paper provides an overview of the main issues of interest in both these areas. Topics covered include: multilingual document indexing, specific requirements of particular languages and scripts, techniques for cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), resources, and system and component evaluation.