Cross-Language Information Retrieval: the way ahead

This introductory paper covers not only the research content of the articles in this special issue of IP&M but attempts to characterize the state-of-the-art in the Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) domain. We present our view of some major directions for CLIR research in the future. In particular, we find that insufficient attention has been given to the Web as a resource for multilingual research, and to languages which are spoken by hundreds of millions of people in the world but have been mainly neglected by the CLIR research community. In addition, we find that most CLIR evaluation has focussed narrowly on the news genre to the exclusion of other important genres such as scientific and technical literature. The paper concludes by describing an ambitious five-year research plan proposed by James Mayfield and Paul McNamee.