Automatic Translation in Cross-Lingual Access to Legislative Databases

This paper considers the use of controlled languages for query translation in a legislative document retrieval system. Problem statement and analysis of the approach are described. The use of controlled languages is motivated by the fact that precision is very important in our case. In many information retrieval systems, the use of unrestricted language resources such as general purpose machine translation or bilingual lexica, provides better recall at the expense of precision. Ambiguities and polysemy make the search engine retrieve irrelevant documents as semantic knowledge is missing. Controlled languages help to better specify the word sense according to the domain of interest. Thus ambiguities are avoided and polysemy is specified according to the domain. We will implement our idea in the area of VAT regulation in Europe.