Ontology-Based Multilingual Information Retrieval

For our first participation in the CLEF evaluation campaign, our aim is to explore a translation-free technique for multilingual information retrieval. This technique is based on an ontological representation of documents and queries. We use a multilingual ontology for documents/queries representation. For each language, we use the multilingual ontology to map a term to its corresponding concept. The same mapping is applied to each document and each query. Then, we use a classic vector space model for the indexing and the querying. The main advantages of our approach are: no merging phase is required, no dependency on automatic translators between all pairs of languages exists, and adding a new language only requires a new mapping dictionary to the multilingual ontology.