Multilingual Information Retrieval Fred Gey   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Tutorials Abstract The growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web has made available vast written and spoken resources on a global scale from almost all countries in the world. The languages represented on the web are a reflection of this diversity of resources and, to the serious searcher, documents in languages other than English may provide unique news, cultural insight and altogether different perspectives on our electronic world. Moreover, most of the world's peoples speak a native tongue other than English. This fact will increasingly be felt on the Internet. During the past decade rapid progress has been made in developing techniques for Multilingual Information Retrieval. Use of electronic bilingual dictionaries and machine translation software has been augmented by lexicons assembled from aligned bilingual parallel corpora of translated documents, techniques for query expansion, phrase recognition and translation disambiguation. On the other hand, most of these resources have been developed and applied to the major European and Asian languages. This half-day tutorial will cover aspects of Multilingual Information Retrieval such as cross language search and retrieval, machine translation and statistical machine translation, multilingual search of the WWW and electronic digital library catalogues, evaluation strategies, evaluation campaigns and test collections for cross-language search effectiveness in the United States (TREC), Japan (NTCIR) and Europe (CLEF). ©2005 Association for Computing Machinery