Multilingual Information Access: Information Retrieval and Translation in a Digital Library

Digital libraries have expanded in the recent years in scope and content to include content in a vast variety of languages. The development of technologies that enable access to this varied language information regardless of geographic or language barriers are a key factor for true global sharing of knowledge. Two such technologies that play a major role in success of multilingual digital libraries are Multilingual Information Retrieval and Translation. We describe our approach and implementation of a Multilingual Information Retrieval system that helps users identify multilingual content and also a customized Reading Assistant service that assists users of a digital library in reading multilingual content via translation. We discuss how both these approaches make extensive use of a Universal Dictionary, a collection of dictionaries of various languages across the world. Index Terms —Digital Library, Multilingual Access, Language Technologies, Machine Translation