A Domain Specific Lexicon Acquisition Tool for Cross-Language Information Retrieval

With the recent enormous increase of information dissemination via the web as incentive there is a growing interest in supporting tools for cross-language retrieval. In this paper we describe a disclosure and retrieval approach that fulfils the needs of both information providers and users by offering fast and cheap access to large amounts of documents from various language domains. Relevant information can be retrieved irrespective of the language used for the specification of a query. In order to realize this type of multilingual functionality the availability of several translation tools is needed, both of a generic and a domain specific nature. Domain specific tools are often not available or only against large costs. In this paper we will therefore focus on a way to reduce these costs, namely the automatic derivation of multilingual resources from so-called parallel text corpora. The benefits of this approach will be illustrated for an example system, i.e. the demonstrator developed within the project Twenty-One, which is tuned to information from the area of sustainable development.