Introduction

Abstract

Searching for information is a part of our everyday life, be it for leisure or professional activities. In most cases, people want to retrieve relevant information written in their native language, usually the language of the query. However, we are more and more exposed to information written in other languages. The World–Wide Web provides a wealth of rich information in different media and languages which people want to access. There are increasing needs to search for information in languages different from that of the query. For example, one may want to retrieve documents written in French or Chinese with a query written in English. This gives rise to the problem of cross–language information retrieval (CLIR), whose aim is to retrieve information in a language different from the language of the query.