Cross-language information access on the web: A tool to help learning foreign languages

For people who are learning foreign languages, the World Wide Web is indisputably a huge amount of learning resources. It can be used as a text corpus, a dictionary, and even a concordance. Web search engines provide various search options to help learning foreign languages, e.g. phrase search can be used to find idioms. However, existing Web search engines do not have a capability to search across languages. Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) technique is a solution to this problem. With this technique, a user can put a query in his/her native language, and retrieves documents written in other language(s). It is particularly useful for learners of foreign language. In this paper, we propose a practical approach to realize CUR of Web documents by using an existing machine-readable dictionary and an existing Web search engine. In the experiments, we show that our method achieves reasonable retrieval effectiveness.