Systems, methods, software, and interfaces for multilingual information retrieval

Abstract

The present inventors have a devised one or more novel methods, systems, and interfaces for facilitating multi-lingual searches. One exemplary method entails creating multiple language-specific indices for a collection of documents, with each index including stemmed and non-stemmed versions of terms from the documents. Users submit queries that are associated with a set of one or more target languages. Query processing entails translating original and stemmed versions of each term in a query into each of the target languages, using one or more techniques that each yield a set of potentially equivalent query terms. Each set of potentially equivalent query terms is then processed against the corresponding language-specific index, using a conventional monolingual search technique, such as a Boolean or natural language query, to identify documents from the collection. The resultant documents are presented to the user in language groupings or by computed relevance.