Technology

The state-of-art technology at Cross Library Services enables any digital collection to be accessed in several languages: they provide a search and navigation experience where the user just types in a request in her/his own language and retrieves hits in all languages s/he is interested in.
The main features of all solutions are the following:

• Automatic language identification: the user is not forced to specify the language of her/his query.
• Ability to translate queries in the target languages by considering the semantics of the query and the contents of the repository.
• Ability to identify Named Entities in order to increase the precision of the research: “La Fontaine” will never be translated into “The Fountain”.
• Semantic search based on concept extraction: if a user cannot find a book on setters, s/he might still be interested in the “The International Encyclopedia of Dogs”.

Natural Language Processing and Cross-Language Information Retrieval technologies developed by CELI and FBK HLT are integrated in CLS services.