EXCLAIM

The EXtensible Cross-Linguistic Automatic Information Machine (EXCLAIM) was an integrated tool for cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), created at the University of California, Santa Cruz in early 2006, with some support for more than a dozen languages. The lead developers were Justin Nuger and Jesse Saba Kirchner.

Early work on CLIR depended on manually constructed parallel corpora for each pair of languages. This method is labor-intensive compared to parallel corpora created automatically. A more efficient way of finding data to train a CLIR system is to use matching pages on the web which are written in different languages.^[1]

EXCLAIM capitalizes on the idea of latent parallel corpora on the web by automating the alignment of such corpora in various domains. The most significant of these is Wikipedia itself, which includes articles in 250 languages. The role of EXCLAIM is to use semantics and linguistic analytic tools to align the information in these Wikipedias so that they can be treated as parallel corpora. EXCLAIM is also extensible to incorporate information from many other sources, such as the Chinese Community Health Resource Center (CCHRC).

One of the main goals of the EXCLAIM project is to provide the kind of computational tools and CLIR tools for minority languages and endangered languages which are often available only for powerful or prosperous majority languages.