The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) is pursuing new approaches for providing timely access to consumer health information in order to accommodate the diverse needs of people in the U.S. and abroad. Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) research explores technologies that allow consumers to request information in their primary language and receive relevant documents in another language.

Because much of the existing online consumer health information is written in English, Cross-Language Information Retrieval research at the Lister Hill Center focuses on helping Spanish-speaking consumers retrieve English-language health-related documents. Once implemented, CLIR will bring non-English speakers one step closer to retrieving the appropriate health information they seek, even if the results are in English.

Further research will extend this project to examine ways to represent retrieved information in Spanish, such as document summaries or lists of keywords. Such tools will aid Spanish-speaking consumers in judging the general usefulness of any retrieved English-language documents.