MproIR { A Cross-language Information Retrieval Component Enhanced by Linguistic Knowledge

With the globalization of the world markets, the need for multilingual information processing increases, because the users are increasingly forced to deal with information available in multiple languages. Due to the fact that translation services are quite expensive, the multilingual society needs smart technologies to access foreign language documents at least to a degree which allows the user to make use of the information provided by them. These technologies should take into account that a user has often only some comprehension ability for a given foreign language. Recent developments in Information Retrieval, therefore, try to support users by providing so-called cross-language retrieval techniques. These systems allow the user to query information about a particular subject in their own language and retrieving relevant documents written in foreign languages. In this paper, the focus is on a cross-language information retrieval component integrated into the multilingual information system emis which is dedicated to the domain of European Media Law. This component, mproir, makes use of linguistic knowledge provided by a morpho-syntactic analysis to increase its e ectiveness. Based on stem information as well as compositional and derivational knowledge, automatic query expansion and translation as well as a classi cation of the retrieved documents is carried out. The languages currently covered by the system are German, English and French. 1