Japanese-Chinese Cross-Language Information Retrieval: An Interlingua Approach

Electronically available multilingual information can be divided into two major categories: (1) alphabetic language information (English-like alphabetic languages) and (2) ideographic language information (Chinese-like ideographic languages). The information available in non-English alphabetic languages as well as in ideographic languages (especially, in Japanese and Chinese) is growing at an incredibly high rate in recent years. Due to the ideographic nature of Japanese and Chinese, complicated with the existence of several encoding standards in use, efficient processing (representation, indexing, retrieval, etc.) of such information became a tedious task. In this paper, we propose a Han Character (Kanji) oriented Interlingua model of indexing and retrieving Japanese and Chinese information. We report the results of mono- and cross- language information retrieval on a Kanji space where documents and queries are represented in terms of Kanji oriented vectors. We also employ a dimensionality reduction technique to compute a Kanji Conceptual Space (KCS) from the initial Kanji space, which can facilitate conceptual retrieval of both mono- and cross- language information for these languages. Similar indexing approaches for multiple European languages through term association (e.g., latent semantic indexing) or through conceptual mapping (using lexical ontology such as, WordNet) are being intensively explored. The Interlingua approach investigated here with Japanese and Chinese languages, and the term (or concept) association model investigated with the European languages are similar; and these approaches can be easily integrated. Therefore, the proposed Interlingua model can pave the way for handling multilingual information access and retrieval efficiently and uniformly.