An Ontology Based Approach to Multilingual Information Retrieval

Today, to effectively meet the needs of users, multilingual information retrieval is an important issue regarding to the continually increasing volume of information in various languages. This paper addresses indexing and retrieval in a trilingual corpus: Arabic, French, English. The proposed system is founded on a knowledge representation formalism, namely semantic graphs which supports a domain ontology. Documents and queries are also represented in this formalism. The domain ontology constitutes the kernel of the system and is used both for indexing and retrieval