The information available in languages other than English on the World Wide Web and global information systems is increasing significantly. According to some recent reports, the growth of non-English speaking Internet users is significantly higher than the growth of English-speaking Internet users. Asia and Europe have become the two most-populated regions of Internet users. However, there are many different languages in the many different countries of Asia and Europe. And there are many

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... es in the world using more than one language as their official languages. For example, Chinese and English are official languages in Hong Kong SAR; English and French are official languages in Canada. In the global economy, information systems are no longer utilized by users in a single geographical region but all over the world. Information can be generated, stored, processed, and accessed in several different languages. All of this reveals the importance of research in multilingual information systems. There are several essential components in multilingual information systems as depicted in Figure 1 . These components are namely multilingual resources, machine translation, cross-lingual information retrieval, multilingual information extraction and summarization, and user evaluations and studies. Multilingual resources include corpora, lexicons, and ontology. Parallel and comparable corpora are important for generating a statistical translation model to overcome the limitations of a manually generated dictionary. In addition, annotated corpora and lexicons have been widely used for many natural language processing tasks. Unfortunately, the development of these resources requires much human intervention. Ontology is an inventory of concepts organized in some internal structuring principle, which is important in organizing and managing information.