Multi-lingual Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries

With the advancements of the Internet and the Digital Library Initiatives in the U.S.A., the research of digital library has been flourished around the world. Recently the increasing availability of networked access to multilingual text collections within such an environment has drawn much attention in the development of cross-language retrieval technology. This article is used to structure a comprehensive discussion of published research and known commercial practice in the western world on the topic. In addition to the focus on the characteristics of Chinese text collections, some brief observations of the potential for multilingual information retrieval are also discussed in details.[Article content in Chinese]