The NIST Institute and the IARPA have awarded a multilingual search engine developed by the Elhuyar R & D team and the UPV Ixa group. These two US Government organisations have a strong interest in the development of cross-linguistic search technologies and, in particular, in cross-linguistic search technologies that take into account English and minority languages. Thanks to this type of search engine, if we perform a search in a language and there are no results in that language, the search engine will return results in other languages.

In order to promote such technologies, last year the NIST institute and the IARPA agency, OpenCLIR, organized a competition. In the contest, several research groups presented their systems. Elhuyar and Ixa presented a system that combines several techniques worked in the thesis works of Xabier Saralegi and Mikel Artetxe.

The competition organisation has announced that the system presented by the Elhuyar R & D team and the Ixa group has obtained the best score, so the first prize has been: € 10,000