Crosslingual Ontology-Based Document Retrieval

An approach for crosslingual ontology-based document retrieval has been devised and is being implemented. It allows the user to enter a query in any language that is part of the system and retrieve documents in selected languages. A domain ontology and term-concept lexicons, containing synonymous terms where applicable, are used to overcome discrepancies between the search query and the words occurring in the documents, in a monolingual situation for the individual languages as well as in a crosslingual setting. The ontology is used in two different ways. First, concepts relevant for a search query are found automatically and used to retrieve documents. Second, relevant parts of the ontology are displayed to the user, who can navigate further starting from the displayed part of the ontology, and explicitly select concepts to continue the search with