So many languages are spoken in the world, and it is not always possible to obtain the bilingual resources
we need for a particular pair of languages. A promising technique to circumvent the problem of
limited availability of linguistic resources would be the pivot language approach, in which an intermediate
language acts as a mediator between two languages for which no bilingual resource is available. Suppose
that a CLIR task between Japanese and Dutch is requested by a user. In this case, machine-readable
resources of Japanese–Dutch pairs may be unavailable, and it would be easier to find Japanese–English and
Dutch–English resources since English is such a widely used language. Thus CLIR between Japanese
and Dutch can be performed via English (as an intermediary) without direct bilingual resources of Japanese
and Dutch.