Document Type

Article

Date

January 2005

Keywords

Foreign language processing, Search and retrieval, OSINT.

Disciplines

Computer and Systems Architecture

Description/Abstract

An English-Arabic Cross-Language Information Retrieval Environment was created in which the analyst can query an Arabic database in English and retrieve a set of relevant Arabic documents. The retrieved Arabic documents are automatically translated into English to facilitate readability by the English-only analyst. Proper names of people, places, and organizations are extracted from the retrieved documents and transliterated from Arabic into English. They are presented to the analyst and serve to provide a brief summarization of the retrieved document search query in English. Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), itself a desideratum in the ARDA workshop, is a special case of Information Retrieval where retrieval is not restricted to the language of the query but queries in one language retrieve documents in other language(s) (Oard and Diekema, 1998).

The Arabic that is used in the system is called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). MSA is the formal Arabic that is used throughout the Arab world in news and broadcast media, and the lingua franca of the Arab. MSA has an estimated 200 million speakers living in Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Egypt, and Northern Africa.

Additional Information

Permission is granted by Proccedings of 2005 International Conference on Intelligence Analysis for SURFACE to distribute this article. All rights reserved to Proccedings of 2005 International Conference on Intelligence Analysis. Please refer to the journal's copyright policy for more information.

Share

COinS