Cross-lingual Document Similarity Calculation Using the Multilingual Thesaurus EUROVOC

Abstract. We are presenting an approach to calculating the semantic similarity of documents written in the same or in different languages. The similarity cal-culation is achieved by representing the document contents in a language-inde-pendent way, using the descriptor terms of the multilingual thesaurus EUROVOC, and by then calculating the distance between these representations. While EUROVOC is a carefully handcrafted knowledge structure, our procedure uses sta-tistical techniques. The method was applied to a collection of 5990 English and Spanish parallel texts and evaluated by measuring the number of times the translation of a given document was identified as the most similar document. The good results showed the feasibility and usefulness of the approach.