Language resources for translation in multilingual question answering systems

Abstract

In the field of Information Retrieval monolingual and multilingual tools are being created that can greatly assist specialists in their work; as well as helping other users find a wide variety of information. Multilingual tools are evolving but several years of study and research are still needed to improve implementations. One of the main difficulties facing these tools is the task of translating queries made by users and the documentary sources found in response (Diekema, 2003). Given the current expansion in research, development, and the creation of multilingual IR systems, it was considered worthwhile analysing and evaluating the resources used by one type of these systems, the multilingual Question Answering systems. Our article is primarily intended as a general purpose analysis and aims to encompass translation in the study of multilingual QA systems. The second general aim is to identify and analyse the linguistic resources and tools found in these systems. Specific objectives include identifying the main types of language resources and tools useful in the multilingual IR processes associated with multilingual QA systems, and establishing how much use is made of these tools by multilingual QA systems.