Multilingual Information Access
This chapter focuses on Multilingual Information Access (MLIA), a multidisciplinary area that aims to solve accessing, querying, and retrieving information from heterogeneous information sources expressed in different languages. Current Information Retrieval technology, combined with Natural Language Processing tools allows building systems able to efficiently retrieve relevant information and, to some extent, to provide concrete answers to questions expressed in natural language. Besides, when linguistic resources and translation tools are available, cross-language information systems can assist to find information in multiple languages. Nevertheless, little is still known about how to properly assist people to find and use information expressed in unknown languages. Approaches proved as useful for automatic systems seem not to match with real user’s needs.