Conceptual Interlingua

What makes CINDOR unique among cross-language information retrieval systems available today is the use of our Conceptual Interlingua for matching. The Conceptual Interlingua is a language neutral lexicon that provides an intelligent reference to move beyond keyword and monolingual search.

We have extensively supplemented and modified the online version of WordNet, a lexical reference system, which uses hierarchies to convey word and phrase relationships in a meaningful and useful representation.

The Conceptual Interlingua sidesteps many of the ease-of-use issues associated with the more common thesaurus-style grouping of synonyms. CINDOR uses the numerical codes assigned to each group of multilingual, synonymous concepts as index entries. Using these numerical codes, the Conceptual Interlingua provides language-independent matching within CINDOR.

If a query contains the term business, the search will retrieve all the documents in the index that contain the same Conceptual Interlingua code as the query term, leading to matches both on business and the synonyms and foreign language equivalents of business.

Document and query matching uses linguistic analysis to include inflectional variants. Thus, CINDOR matches at a conceptual level rather than the much more restrictive exact word match level (lexical level).

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