Abstract
Cross lingual information access (CLIA) systems are required to access the large amounts of multilingual content generated on the world wide web in the form of blogs, news articles and documents. In this paper, we discuss our approach to query formation for CLIA systems where language resources are replaced by Wikipedia. We claim that Wikipedia, with its rich multilingual content and structure, forms an ideal platform to build a CLIA system. Our approach is particularly useful for under-resourced languages, as all the languages don’t have the resources (tools) with sufficient accuracies. We propose a context aware language-independent query formation method which, with the help of bilingual dictionaries, forms queries in the target language. Results are encouraging with a precision of 69.75% and thus endorse our claim on using Wikipedia for building CLIA systems.