An Intelligent Multilingual Information Browsing and Retrieval System Using Information Extraction

An Intelligent Multilingual Information Browsing and Retrieval System Using Information Extraction Chinatsu Aone and Nicholas Charocopos and James Gorlinsky Systems Research and Applications Corporation (SRA) 4300 Fair Lakes Court Fairfax, VA 22033 aonec@sra.com Abstract In this paper, we describe our multilingual (or cross-linguistic) information browsing and retrieval system, which is aimed at monolingual users who are interested in in- formation from multiple language sources. The system takes advantage of information extraction (IE) technology in novel ways to improve the accuracy of cross-linguistic retrieval and to provide innovative meth- ods for browsing and exploring multilin- gual document collections. The system in- dexes texts in different languages (e.g., En- glish and Japanese) and allows the users to retrieve relevant texts in their native lan- guage (e.g., English). The retrieved text is then presented to the users with proper names and specialized domain terms trans- lated and hyperlinked. Moreover, the sys- tem allows interactive information discov- ery from a multilingual document collec- tion. 1 Introduction More and more multilingual information is available on-line every day. The World Wide Web (WWW), for example, is becoming a vast depository of mul- tilingual information. However, monolingual users can currently access information only in their na- tive language. For example, it is not easy for a monolingual English speaker to locate necessary in- formation written in Japanese. The users would not know the query terms in Japanese even if the search engine accepts Japanese queries. In addition, even when the users locate a possibly relevant text in Japanese, they will have little idea about what is in the text. Outputs of off-the-shelf machine trans- lation (MT) systems are often of low-quality, and even "high-end" MT systems have problems partic- ularly in translating proper names and specialized domain terms, which often contain the most critical information to the users. In this paper, we describe our multilingual (or cross-linguistic) information browsing and retrieval system, which is aimed at monolingual users who are interested in information from multiple language sources. The system takes advantage of information extraction (IE) technology in novel ways to improve the accuracy of cross-linguistic retrieval and to pro- vide innovative methods for browsing and exploring multilingual document collections. The system in- dexes texts in different languages (e.g., English and Japanese) and allows the users to retrieve relevant texts in their native language (e.g., English). The retrieved text is then presented to the users with proper names and specialized domain terms trans- lated and hyperlinked. The system also allows the user in their native language to browse and discover information buried in the database derived from the entire document collection. 2 System Description The system consists of the Indexing Module, the Client Module, the Term Translation Module, and the Web Crawler. The Indexing Module creates and loads indices into a database while the Client Module allows browsing and retrieval of information in the database through a Web browser-based graphical user interface (GUI). The Term Translation Mod- ule is bi-directional; it dynamically translates user queries into target foreign …

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