With the growing signzjicance of digital libraries and the Internet, more and more electronic texts become accessible to a wide and geographically disperse public. This requires adequate tools to facilitate indexing, storage, and retrieval of documents written in different languages. We present a method f o r semiautomatic indexing of electronic documents and construction of a multilingual thesaurus, which can be used for query formulation and information retrieval. We use special dictionaries m d user interaction in order to solve ambiguities andjnd adequate canonical terms in the language and an adequate abstract language-independent term. n e abstract thesaurus is updated incrementally by new indexed documents and is used to search for documents using adequate terms