Introduction to the Special Issue on Cross-Language Algorithms and Applications

With the increasingly global nature of our everyday interactions, the need for multilin- gual technologies to support efficient and effective information access and communication cannot be overemphasized. Computational modeling of language has been the focus of Natural Language Processing, a subdiscipline of Artificial Intelligence. One of the current challenges for this discipline is to design methodologies and algorithms that are cross- language in order to create multilingual technologies rapidly. The goal of this JAIR special issue on Cross-Language Algorithms and Applications (CLAA) is to present leading re- search in this area, with emphasis on developing unifying themes that could lead to the development of the science of multi- and cross-lingualism. In this introduction, we provide the reader with the motivation for this special issue and summarize the contributions of the papers that have been included. The selected papers cover a broad range of cross-lingual technologies including machine translation, domain and language adaptation for sentiment analysis, cross-language lexical resources, dependency parsing, information retrieval and knowledge representation. We anticipate that this special issue will serve as an invaluable resource for researchers interested in topics of cross-lingual natural language processing.