Article,
A Multilingual Information Processing Infrastructure for Global Digital Libraries: EPICIST
International Symposium on Research, Development and Practice in Digital Libraries, (1997)
Abstract
This paper proposes and evaluates a character or symbol code infrastructure called EPICIST (Efficient, Programmable and Interchangeable Code Infrastructure for Symbols and Texts) for multilingual and multi-cultural information processing. EPICIST is based on EPICS (Efficient, Programmable and Interchangeable Code System) and includes utilities for multilingual information processing. EPICIST integrates an efficient variable-length coding system, a smart virtual machine and utilities. The variable-length coding system provides a huge code space. This huge space can include not only standardized characters but also user-specific symbols. The smart virtual machine executes inputs as instructions and is dynamically customizable. It allows one to define and modify instructions at runtime. It provides customization facilities. The utilities include facilities for searching, normalization, transliteration and compression of multilingual texts. They are universal and independent of specific languages.
