My participation in the first NTCIR workshop starting in 1997 led to a fifteen year research
journey. It was a journey through Kanji, Katakana, Hiragana, segmentation, bigrams,
phonetic recognition, decompounding and parallel corpora alignment for lexicon
development. In languages the travels went through Japanese, Chinese, Korean, European
languages, Russian, Arabic, and Hindi, as well as mathematics. It produced three SIGIR
workshops (2002, 2006, 2009) on cross-language search and multilingual information …