CLIR-Based Collaborative Construction of a Multilingual Terminological Dictionary for Cultural Resources

We will describe ongoing work in developing a collaborative environment to construct a CLIRbased multilingual terminological dictionary dedicated to the Digital Silk Road project and web site launched and managed by NII (National institute of Informatics, Japan-Tokyo). A considerable amount of cultural resources has been digitized, including 95 rare books written in 10 different languages. In order to make them searchable and accessible easily by the visitors of the site, themselves multilingual as well, a cross lingual information retrieval system is being built. As these books are very rich in specialized terms, an important part of that endeavour is to gather these terms in many languages in a terminologicial dictionary (a database of terms contianing some information potentially usable to later build a real terminological database). For that purpose, we use a participative approach, where visitors of the online archive are the main source of the terms used in the languages they know, while multilingual online resources are used to initialize the term base through a process that depends on the archived textual data. 1 The first, the third, and the fourth authors work at Grenoble Informatics Laboratory, GETALP, Université Joseph Fourier (Grenoble, France). 2 The second author works for the National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo, Japan).