Cross-Language Information Retrieval in a Multilingual Legal Domain

We describe here the application of a cross-language information retrieval technique based on similarity thesauri in the domain of Swiss law. We present the theory of similarity thesauri, which are information structures deerived from corpora, and show how they can be used for cross-language retrieval. We also discuss the collections of Swiss legal documents and show how we have used them to construct an environment in which we can directly evaluate the performance of our cross-language retrieval system. Evaluation shows that cross-language retrieval works equally as well as monolingual retrieval in the best case. We conclude that providing cross-language access to digital libraries is already a viable possibility.