Multilingual information retrieval (IR) involves searching through documents written in multiple languages, presenting challenges such as language barriers, translation issues, and the need for efficient cross-language retrieval.
One major challenge is handling language-specific nuances, such as idiomatic expressions, grammar, and synonyms, which can affect the accuracy of retrieval. Machine translation can help bridge the gap, but it often introduces errors or loss of meaning.
IR systems must also support multilingual indexing and ensure that search queries in one language can retrieve relevant documents in other languages. Techniques like cross-lingual embeddings and bilingual dictionaries are employed to address these challenges.