Cross-Language Web Querying: The EuroSearch Approach

Abstract

Initially comprising services from Italy (Arianna), Spain (OIŽ) and Switzerland (EuroSpider), EuroSearch¹ will provide a multilingual searching functionality. Each national site is responsible for maintaining and operating a search service for its own languages, so that the needs of distinct language communities can be catered for by native speakers of that language. The languages covered are currently French, German, Italian and Spanish, plus also English. Differences in the partners’ document collections and indexing mechanisms have led to the implementation of different search strategies, depending on the collection to be queried. The cross-language search component of EuroSearch thus consists of an integration of lexicon- and corpus-based search mechanisms and two distinct types of searching will be activated: u query translation using a multilingual lexicon; enhanced by an experimental corpus-based mechanism u similarity thesaurus technology.