CACAO offers an innovative approach for accessing, understanding and navigating multilingual textual content in digital libraries and library catalogues, enabling European users to better exploit the available European content.

The aim of CACAO is to provide an infrastructure to the end-user that enables him/her to type queries in his/her own language and retrieve documents and objects in any available language. The sound integration of CACAO's infrastructure designed for multilingual purposes with current digital library and catalogue systems will be reached by coupling natural language processing techniques with existing information retrieval systems. CACAO will deliver tools for the maintenance of multilingual resources in the retrieval context. By coupling sound Natural Language Processing techniques with available information retrieval systems and tools for facilitating the maintenance of multilingual resources, we will deliver a non-intrusive infrastructure to be integrated with current library catalogues and digital libraries. As a result, the user will be able to type in queries in his/her own language and retrieve volumes and documents in any available language.

Such an infrastructure will be crucial to promote aggregation of content at the European level. Already during the lifetime of the project, CACAO will promote the aggregation of content, in particular:

• the largest European aggregation of digital libraries, i.e. The European Library will adopt the CACAO infrastructure.
• The library catalogues of the five partner libraries will be aggregated into a single multilingual access point.
• Three thematic portals aggregating several European collections (Mathematics, Medieval literature, Geography) will be made available to the public.

More information about CACAO is available on its home page .

The role of CELI within CACAO is the one of bringing in competences for mono-lingual and cross-language processing, as well as integration with the main Digital Libraries protocols.

External links

CACAO in the press

• Al via il progetto CACAO per esplorare i testi delle biblioteche digitali
• Progetto CACAO per l'accesso multilingue a biblioteche e cataloghi online
• Xerox Research Centre Europe coordina il progetto europeo CACAO
• Xerox Research seeks to improve multilingual access

DEMO

• CACAO becomes cross library

Internal Links

• Curtoni P. and Dini L., Celi participation at CLEF 2006: Cross language delegated search. In CLEF2006 Working notes (download)
• Curtoni P., Dini L., Di Tomaso V., CELI Participation at ImageCLEF 2006: Comparison with the Ad-hoc Track, In CLEF2006 Working notes.(download)
• Dini L, Liebwald D., Mommers L., Peters W., Peters E., Voermans W.: "Cross-lingual legal information retrieval using a WordNet architecture", ICAIL 2005: 163-167 (link)(download)
• Bernardi R.,Calvanese D., Dini L.,Di Tomaso V., Frasnelli E., Kugler U., Plank B., Multilingual Search in Libraries. The case-study of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano", Int. Conf. on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006). (download)
• Call for papers for NLP4DL