Search results

This paper aims to describe the structure of an aligned Serbian-German literary corpus (SrpNemKor) contained in a digital library Bibliša. The goal of the research was to create a benchmark Serbian-German annotated corpus searchable with various query expansions.

The presented research is particularly focused on the enhancement of bilingual search queries in a full-text search of aligned SrpNemKor collection. The enhancement is based on using existing lexical resources such as Serbian morphological electronic dictionaries and the bilingual lexical database Termi.

For the purpose of this research, the lexical database Termi is enriched with a bilingual list of German-Serbian translated pairs of lexical units. The list of correct translation pairs was extracted from SrpNemKor, evaluated and integrated into Termi. Also, Serbian morphological e-dictionaries are updated with new entries extracted from the Serbian part of the corpus.

A bilingual search of SrpNemKor in Bibliša is available within the user-friendly platform. The enriched database Termi enables semantic enhancement and refinement of user’s search query based on synonyms both in Serbian and German at a very high level. Serbian morphological e-dictionaries facilitate the morphological expansion of search queries in Serbian, thereby enabling the analysis of concepts and concept structures by identifying terms assigned to the concept, and by establishing relations between terms in Serbian and German which makes Bibliša a valuable Web tool that can support research and analysis of SrpNemKor.

This paper aims to present the results of the second stage of a research project aiming to develop a bilingual interface for the retrieval of digital images. The main objective of this phase was to investigate the roles and usefulness of search characteristics and functionalities for image retrieval in a bilingual context.

A bilingual (English and French) questionnaire containing closed and open questions was developed and administered to two groups of participants: 20 English-speaking and 20 French-speaking respondents. The quantitative data was analysed according to statistical methods while the content of the open-ended questions was analysed and coded to identify emergent themes.

This study shows that the image search process still presents difficulties and frustration from the image searchers' point-of-view. The findings established that keyword search remains the main method compared with the use of predefined categories or searching with a similar image or a drawing. They emphasised the importance of several functionalities as an integral part of the image search process and revealed the importance of being able to search for images with words extracted from more than one language.

The main contribution of this exploratory study is to provide an understanding of how real users search for images. Combined with the exploration of best practices for image retrieval, the analysis of real image searchers' behaviours provides the foundation for the initial organisation of the search interface model we will develop in the ultimate stage of the research project.

Bilingual education is a strong component in some education systems, districts, and academic curriculums, and non‐existent in others. There is presently much controversy surrounding the issue of whether or not bilingual education is effective in providing non‐English speaking children a good education. Government officials, researchers, and educators all differ as to the need of bilingual education, especially when funding is under consideration. Thus, the need for in‐depth research is in great demand. The availability of the Bilingual Education Bibliographic Abstracts (BEBA) database provides a primary resource for research in this burgeoning area. The question is thus raised, how effective is BEBA in comparison with other databases such as ERIC, Exceptional Child Education Resources, Language and Language Behavior Abstracts, MLA Bibliography, National Institute for Mental Health, Psychological Abstracts, School Practices Information File, and Sociological Abstracts. This study attempts to investigate the differences among these databases and to provide the reader a better understanding of BEBA.

This paper aims to present the third stage of a research project that aims to develop a bilingual interface for the retrieval of digital images. The requirements and implementation of the search engine are described. Image search engines attempt to give access to a range of online images available on the web.

The strategy of using open-source software components as much as possible was chosen for the advantages of this approach: low initial cost and accessibility to evaluate and develop enhancements independently and driven by research objectives rather than financial viability.

Open-source software components can be used to develop the interface. The implementation of the image search engine and its indexes uses: Apache Solr, AJAX-Solr, jsTree and jQuery. Microsoft Translator web service was integrated into the interface to provide the optional user query translation.

The search interface is intended to be an innovative tool for image searchers who are looking for digital images. The search interface gives the image searchers the opportunity to easily access a variety of visual resources and facilitates searching for images in two different languages (English and French).

The purpose of this paper is to develop a search engine dedicated to image retrieval in a bilingual (French and English) context. This paper presents the first phase of user testing that was carried out to validate and refine SINCERITY, the new search device.

This first phase of the search engine testing involved a small group of image searchers (10 French-speaking and 10 English-speaking participants) who were asked to retrieve a sample of images (30) using the new tool. A questionnaire was also developed to compile the comments of the users.

The results of this first phase of testing revealed that even though image indexing was sometimes problematic, the participants did not encounter major difficulties retrieving images with SINCERITY. Comments and suggestions received will be taken into consideration to improve the performance and aesthetics of the search engine.

Once fully operational, SINCERITY will allow users to search images in an attractive and user-friendly manner. Eventually, other types of images (documentary and artistic) will be added to the image database linked to the image search engine, as well as other languages.

To present a method for creating a comparable document collection from two document collections in different languages.

The best query keys were extracted from a Finnish source collection (articles of the newspaper Aamulehti) with the relative average term frequency formula. The keys were translated into English with a dictionary‐based query translation program. The resulting lists of words were used as queries that were run against the target collection (Los Angeles Times articles) with the nearest neighbor method. The documents were aligned with unrestricted and date‐restricted alignment schemes, which were also combined.

The combined alignment scheme was found the best, when the relatedness of the document pairs was assessed with a five‐degree relevance scale. Of the 400 document pairs, roughly 40 percent were highly or fairly related and 75 percent included at least lexical similarity.

The number of alignment pairs was small due to the short common time period of the two collections, and their geographical (and thus, topical) remoteness. In future, our aim is to build larger comparable corpora in various languages and use them as source of translation knowledge for the purposes of cross‐language information retrieval (CLIR).

Readily available parallel corpora are scarce. With this method, two unrelated document collections can relatively easily be aligned to create a CLIR resource.

The method can be applied to weakly linked collections and morphologically complex languages, such as Finnish.

Seeking online bilingual scientific information is a key aspect of bilingual scientific Web literacy – abilities to engage critically with science on the Web using two languages. This study aims to determine whether factors such as age, education major, gender and type of school attended at secondary level (monolingual, bilingual, trilingual) influence undergraduates’ ability to search online Spanish-English bilingual scientific information.

The participants in this study were 60 students (43 females and 17 males, 18–25 years old) enrolled in a university bilingual science course at a high-ranked Colombian university. They were asked to complete two tasks in which they had to seek online scientific information in Spanish and in English and post their responses on the Web application, Padlet^® (padlet.com).

Results indicate that students’ gender and age influence their academic performance in both tasks and level of originality in using information obtained via the Web, respectively. Moreover, the “scientific journal” was the top source of online information from which participants sought most information to complete both tasks.

People are becoming increasingly accustomed to seeking and sharing online scientific information to support points of view and make decisions. However, it is not known which factors influence students’ ability to seek online first language-English bilingual scientific information in countries where English is the second or foreign language.

The use of bilingual authority files in academic and research libraries has been successful in most of the multicultural societies. Today, with the advancement of information and communication technology many libraries and information services providers on the Internet are accessible in more than one language, facilitating access, retrieval and use of information for scattered users all over the world. Nevertheless, there are also challenges associated with the provision and use of bilingual authority files. This study analyses and describes bilingual authority files of the main library of the International Islamic University of Malaysia. The study also investigated perceptions of cataloguers and end‐users in relation to the bilingual authority files. All the three cataloguing staff at the “Department of Arabic and Religious Resources” and 23 end‐users were interviewed. Respondents felt that the use of bilingual authority files was essential for the success of the library use. However, the end‐users felt that more subject headings and bibliographic information of missing material should be provided. Meanwhile, the cataloguers believed that bilingualism has an effect on bibliographic control. They also felt that AACR2 and LCSH should be translated into the Arabic language.

With the increasing number of online multilingual resources, cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) has drawn much attention from the information retrieval (IR) research community. However, few studies have examined how and why multilingual searchers seek information in two or more languages, specifically how they switch and mix language in queries to get satisfying results. The purpose of this paper is to focus on Chinese–English bilinguals’ intra-sentential code-switching behaviors in online searches. The scenarios and reasons of code-switching, factors that may affect code-switching, the patterns of mixed language query formulation and reformulation and how current IR systems and other search tools can facilitate such information needs were examined.

In-depth semi-structured interviews were used as the research method. In total, 30 participants were recruited based on their English proficiency, location and profession, using a purposive sampling method.

Four scenarios and four reasons for using Chinese–English mixed language queries to cover information needs were identified, and results suggest that linguistic and cultural/social factors are of equivalent importance in code-switching behaviors. English terms and Chinese terms in queries play different roles in searches, and mixed language queries are irreplaceable by either single language queries or other search facilitating features. Findings also suggest current search engines and tools need greater emphasis in the user interface and more user education is required.

This study presents a qualitative analysis of bilinguals’ code-switching behaviors in online searches. Findings are expected to advance the theoretical understanding of bilingual users’ search strategies and interactions with IR systems, and provide insights for designing more effective IR systems and tools to discover multilingual online resources, including cross-language controlled vocabularies, personalized CLIR tools and mixed language query assistants.

This paper seeks to describe a qualitative user study of Searchling – an experimental visual interface that allows users to leverage a bilingual thesaurus for query formulation and enhancement.

The design of Searchling is based on theories of thesaurus‐based interface design, combined with the principles of rich‐prospect browsing. The Searchling interface provides the user with three working spaces on one screen: the Thesaurus space, Query space, and Document space. A total of 15 graduate and faculty researchers at the University of Alberta, were interviewed, who carried out three structured tasks in a thinkaloud protocol, with simultaneous audio recording and screen capture.

The participants identified a number of significant advantages to the researchers provided by Searchling, including the value of having an interface that could help with identifying search terms, suggesting preferred terms, and giving bilingual search support. They also suggested areas for future improvement, primarily related to the assumption that common knowledge of thesauri would be sufficient to make the various features clear, if they were described using standard vocabulary from the thesaurus field.

The interface can be implemented as an operational user interface to support users' exploratory and browsing behaviours.

The paper describes a new visual way of incorporating a thesaurus into a user interface with the ability of browsing, querying and examining the results all at the same time.