Information Retrieval Challenges in Multilingual Literary Archives

Abstract

Multilingual literary archives play a vital role in preserving cultural heritage and helping to conduct comparative research. But there is a significant problem in retrieving information on these archives. This paper discussed the major issues of retrieval in multilingual literature collections, specifically linguistic diversity, semantic ambiguity, metadata inconsistency, and technology constraints. The literature review indicates that morphological variation, polysemy, and culturally embedded meanings all are significant challenges based on a qualitative study of the literature available. They make indexing, querying and cross linguistic retrieval even more difficult. High and low resource languages also cause inequitable performance and limit access to marginalized literary traditions. The paper identifies the destructive nature of poor, culturally blind metadata standards. It further demonstrates that machine translation and key word-based systems tend to overlook the interpretive and contextual layer of the literature. These problems require an interdisciplinary approach. It can be assisted by the combination of computational linguistics, digital humanities, and literary studies. It is also important to develop inclusive metadata structures and development of sophisticated semantic retrieval frameworks. This study contributes to the current debate to transform multilingual libraries into more equitable, findable, and viable. Furthermore, this paper also explains the various application on information retrieval system. This paper recommends that the technical, institutional, and ethical solutions need to be combined to overcome the issues of information retrieval in the multilingual literary archives.