Improving Cross-Language Information Retrieval by Harnessing the Social Web

Combining existing advancements in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) with the new usercentered Web paradigm could allow tapping into Web-based multilingual clusters of language information that are rich, up-to-date in terms of language usage, that increase in size, and have the potential to cater for all languages. In this chapter, we set out to explore existing CLIR systems and their limitations, and we argue that in the current context of a widely adopted social Web, the future of large-scale CLIR and iCLIR systems is linked to the use of the Web as a lexical resource, as a distribution infrastructure, and as a channel of communication between users. Such a synergy will lead to systems that grow organically as more users with different linguistic skills join the network, and that improve in terms of language translations disambiguation and coverage.