Indexing multilingual information on the Web

The Web connects people speaking more than twenty languages in more than one hundred countries. Search engines, which provide users with starting points to navigate and retrieve resources an the Web, should thus be able to handle documents in many languages. Moreover, with information being added and changed every minute on the Web, search engines should discover new index terms time-efficiently. The paper introduces an abstraction of viewing multilingual documents and a statistical analysis method so that search engines can index multilingual documents in a generic, efficient, and effective manner with minimal requirements of language-specific information.