MultiLexExplorer: Combining Multilingual Web Search with Multilingual Lexical Resources

Multilingual lexical resources provide information about linguistic relation of words in-between languages. On the other hand, huge document collections like the World Wide Web provide statistical information about the distribution and co-occurrence of words in almost all languages. In this paper, we present a tool that was designed to combine the information from both resources in order to support multilingual web search or help in disambiguating word meanings by providing to a user information about the distribution of words in the web. The tool can also be used in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) applications for teaching foreign languages. Learners can better understand the different meanings of a word in their native language, and even more important, explore its meanings in a foreign language. Combined web searches can help in understanding meanings, since the search results provide examples for word and phrase usage. Furthermore, hit statistics of word cooccurrences in web pages provide hints about correct translations or word usage.