In this paper we evaluate the Basic Travel Expression Corpus (BTEC), developed by ATR (Advanced Telecommunication Research Laboratory), Japan. BTEC was specifically developed as a wide-coverage, consistent corpus containing basic Japanese travel expressions with English counterparts, for the purpose of providing basic data for the development of high quality speech translation systems. To evaluate the corpus, we introduce a quantitative method for evaluating the sufficiency of qualitatively well-defined corpora, on the basis of LNRE methods that can estimate the potential growth patterns of various sparse data by fitting various skewed distributions such as the Zipfian group of distributions, lognormal distribution, and inverse Gauss-Poisson distribution to them. The analyses show the coverage of lexical items of BTEC vis-a-vis the possible targets implicitly defined by the corpus itself, and thus provides basic insights into strategies for enhancing BTEC in future.

This position paper for the special session on "Multilingual Information Access" comprises of three parts. The first part reviews possible demands for Multilingual Information Access (hereafter, MLIA) on the Web, and examines required technical elements. Among those, we, in the second part, focus on Cross-Language Information Retrieval (hereafter, CLIR), particularly a scalable architecture which enables CLIR in a number of language combinations. Such a distributed architecture developed around XIRCH project (an international joint experimental project currently involves NTT, KRDL, and KAIST) is then described in a certain detail. The final part discusses some NLP/MT related issues associated with such a CLIR architecture.