Multi-Lingual LSA with Serbian and Croatian: An Investigative Case Study

Abstract

One of the challenges in information retrieval is attempting to search a corpus of documents that may contain multiple languages. This exploratory study expands upon earlier research employing Latent Semantic Analysis (so called Multi-Lingual Latent Semantic Indexing, or ML-LSI/LSA). We experiment using this approach, and a new one, in a multi-lingual context utilising two similar languages, namely Serbian and Croatian. Traditionally, with an LSA approach, a parallel corpus would be needed in order to train the system by combining identical documents in two languages into one document. We repeat that approach and also experiment with creating a semantic space using the parallel corpus on its own without merging the documents together to test the hypothesis that, with very similar languages, the merging of documents may not be required for good results.