  With the growing significance of digital libraries and the Internet, more and
more electronic texts become accessible to a wide and geographically disperse
public. This requires adequate tools to facilitate indexing, storage, and
retrieval of documents written in different languages. We present a method for
semi-automatic indexing of electronic documents and construction of a
multilingual thesaurus, which can be used for query formulation and information
retrieval. We use special dictionaries and user interaction in order to solve
ambiguities and find adequate canonical terms in the language and adequate
abstract language-independent terms. The abstract thesaurus is updated
incrementally by new indexed documents and is used to search document
concerning terms in a query to the document base.

Digital Libraries