An Overview of the Linguistic Resources used in Cross-Language Question Answering Systems in CLEF Conference

Abstract

The development of the Semantic Web requires great economic and human effort. Consequently, it is very useful to create mechanisms and tools that facilitate its expansion. From the standpoint of information retrieval (hereafter IR), access to the contents of the Semantic Web can be favored by the use of natural language, as it is much simpler and faster for the user to engage in his habitual form of expression. The growing popularity of Internet and the wide availability of web informative resources for general audiences are a fairly recent phenomenon, although man´s need to hurdle the language barrier and communicate with others is as old as the history of mankind. The World Wide Web, also known as WWW, together with the growing globalization of companies and organizations, and the increase of the non-English speaking audience, entails the demand for tools allowing users to secure information from a wide range of resources. Yet the underlying linguistic restrictions are often overlooked by researchers and designers. Against this background, a key characteristic to be evaluated in terms of the efficiency of IR systems is its capacity to allow users find a corpus of documents in different languages, and to facilitate the relevant information despite limited linguistic competence regarding the target language.