Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval and Semantic Interoperability for Cultural Heritage Repositories

This paper describes a computational linguistics- based approach for providing interoperability between multi-lingual systems in order to overcome crucial issues like cross-language and cross-collection retrieval. Our proposal is a system which improves capabilities of language- technology-based information extraction. In the last few years, various theories have been developed and applied for making multicultural and multilingual resources easy to access. Important initiatives, like the development of the European Library and Europeana, aim to increase the availability of digital content from various types of providers and institutions. Therefore the accessibility to these resources requires the development of environments enabling to manage multilingual complexity. In this respect, we present a methodological framework which allows mapping both the data and the metadata among the languagespecific ontologies. The feasibility of crosslanguage information extraction and semantic search will be tested by implementing an early prototype system.