Cross-lingual thesaurus for multilingual knowledge management

The Web is a universal repository of human knowledge and culture which has allowed unprecedented sharing of ideas and information in a scale never seen before. It can also be considered as a universal digital library interconnecting digital libraries in multiple domains and languages. Beside the advance of information technology, the global economy has also accelerated the development of inter-organizational information systems. Managing knowledge obtained in multilingual information systems from multiple geographical regions is an essential component in the contemporary inter-organization information systems. An organization cannot claim itself to be a global organization unless it is capable to overcome the cultural and language barriers in their knowledge management. Cross-lingual semantic interoperability is a challenge in multilingual knowledge management systems. Dictionary is a tool that is widely utilized in commercial systems to cross the language barrier. However, terms available in dictionary are always limited. As language is evolving, there are new words being created from time to time. For examples, there are new technical terms and name entities such as RFID and Baidu. To solve the problem of cross-lingual semantic interoperability, an associative constraint network approach is investigated to construct an automatic cross-lingual thesaurus. In this work, we have investigated the backmarking algorithm and the forward evaluation algorithm to resolve the constraint satisfaction problem represented by the associative constraint network. Experiments have been conducted and show that the forward evaluation algorithm outperforms the backmarking one in terms of precision and recall but the backmarking algorithm is more efficient than the forward evaluation algorithm. We have also benchmarked with our earlier technique, Hopfield network, and showed that the associate constraint network (either backmarking or forward evaluation) outperforms in precision, recall, and efficiency. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.