Modern Multilingual and Cross-lingual Information Access Technologies

In this chapter, we describe the state of the art cross-lingual and multilingual strategies and their related areas. In particular, we show a WWW-based information system called MIETTA, which allows uniform and multilingual access to heterogeneous data sources in the tourism domain. The design of the search engine is based on a new cross-lingual framework. The framework integrates a cross-lingual retrieval strategy with natural language techniques: information extraction and multilingual generation. The combination of information extraction and multilingual generation enables on the one hand, multilingual presentation of the database content, and on the other hand, free text cross-lingual information retrieval of the structured data entries. We will demonstrate that the framework is useful for domain specific and multilingual applications and provides strategies for the future question answering systems, which should be able to deal with heterogeneous data sources in a multilingual