Exploiting Social Semantics for Multilingual Information Retrieval [Elektronische Ressource] / Philipp Sorg. Betreuer: R. Studer

Exploiting Social Semantics for MultilingualInformation RetrievalZur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einesDoktors der Wirtschaftswissenschaften(Dr. rer. pol.)von der Fakultat¨ fur¨Wam Karlsruher Institut fur¨ Technologievorgelegte DissertationvonDipl.-Inf. Philipp SorgTag der mundlic¨ hen Prufung:¨ 22. Juli 2011Referent: Prof. Dr. Rudi StuderKorreferent: Prof. Dr. Philipp CimianoPrufer:¨ Prof. Dr. Andreas OberweisVorsitzender der Prufungsk¨ ommission: Prof. Dr. Christof WeinhardtiiAbstractInformation Retrieval (IR) deals with delivering relevant information items giventhe specific information needs of users. As retrieval problems are defined in variousenvironments such as the World Wide Web, corporate knowledge bases or even per-sonal desktops, IR is an every day problem that concerns almost everybody in oursociety. In this thesis, we present research results on the problem of MultilingualIR (MLIR), which defines retrieval scenarios that cross language borders. MLIR is areal-world problem which we motivate using different application scenarios, for ex-ample search systems having users with reading skills in several languages or expertretrieval.As the main topic of this thesis, we consider how user-generated content thatis assembled by different popular Web portals can be exploited for MLIR. Theseportals, prominent examples are Wikipedia or Yahoo! Answers, are built from thecontributions of millions of users.