Enhancing Visibility Across Languages: Semantic Multilingual Search for Scholarly Content

Scholarly knowledge is created and shared through a wide range of sources — repositories, journals, data platforms, and other scholarly information systems — and in hundreds of languages. Yet, most discovery tools continue to privilege a few dominant languages, leaving large portions of research effectively invisible to global audiences. This paper explores the concept of semantic multilingual search: an emerging approach that retrieves information by meaning rather than by exact wording, enabling users to search in any supported language and discover relevant work across all languages.

Instead of proposing a fixed technical design, the document invites the community to consider how semantic multilingual search could evolve within the broader ecosystem of scholarly communication. It reflects on early experiences, shared principles, and collective responsibilities to ensure that this new generation of discovery tools advances openness, equity, and linguistic diversity.

Developed within COAR’s broader vision of openness, multilingualism, and bibliodiversity, this paper aims to stimulate dialogue and advance collaboration toward discovery systems that reflect the full linguistic and cultural diversity of global scholarship. It contains a “Call to the Community” for feedback about this approach so that, when you ask a question in your language, the entire world should have a chance to understand and respond.