Guest editorial: Artificial intelligence and software multilinguality

In this editorial we briefly discuss issues related to multilinguality in t he software industry and highlight areas where AI-based methods, techniques , and tools can be used to support multilinguality. We then provide short d escriptions of the five papers selected for this special issue. Two cover r esearch work on localization of user interfaces and documentation (Boutsis et al. and Bateman et al.) and are published in this issue. The other three cover research work on multilingual text retrieval (Gonzalo et al., Michos et al., and Azzam et al.) and are to be published in issue no 7. Our goal is to show the readers that existing AI methods, although not always mature and near-to-market, can offer much help to support multilinguality in the software industry.