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1 – 10 of over 105000LIS departments in English speaking countries frequently neglect the study of foreign languages. Argues that this is short‐sighted. Information professionals will be increasingly…
Abstract
LIS departments in English speaking countries frequently neglect the study of foreign languages. Argues that this is short‐sighted. Information professionals will be increasingly required to analyse and organise information from different cultural backgrounds, and to disseminate their own materials to an international and hence culturally diverse user group. The first section demonstrates the extent to which the English language dominates international communication. The second section shows that this problem is largely ignored by English language publications regarding the future of the LIS profession. Section three makes six positive suggestions of how to integrate new modules into current LIS courses to overcome the Anglo‐American bias and thus to educate students to become true experts in the multicultural information.
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This paper seeks to examine the further integration of machine translation technologies with cross language information access in providing web users the capabilities of accessing…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to examine the further integration of machine translation technologies with cross language information access in providing web users the capabilities of accessing information beyond language barriers. Machine translation and cross language information access are related technologies, and yet they have their own unique contributions in handling information in multiple languages. This paper aims to demonstrate that there are many opportunities to further integrate machine translation with cross language information access, and the combination can greatly empower web users in their information access.
Design/methodology/approach
Using English and Chinese as the language pair for studying, this paper looks at machine translation in query translation‐based cross language information access at multiple important aspects, which include query translation, relevance feedback, interactive cross language information access, out‐of‐vocabulary term translation, and data fusion. The goal is to obtain more insights about the wide range usages of machine translation in cross language information access, and to help the community to identify promising future directions for both machine translation and cross language access.
Findings
Machine translation can be applied effectively in many places in the whole cross language information access process. Queries translated by a machine translation system are high quality and are more robust in handling potential untranslated terms. Translation enhancement, a relevance feedback method using machine translation generated returned documents, is not only a valid technique by itself, but also helps to generate more robust cross language information access performance when combined with other relevance feedback techniques. Machine translation is also found to play a significant role in resolving untranslated terms and in data fusion.
Originality/value
This set of comparative empirical studies on integrating machine translation and cross language information access was performed on a common evaluation framework, and examined integration at multiple points of the cross language access process. The experimental results demonstrate the value of further integrating machine translation in cross language information access, and identify interesting future directions for both machine translation and cross language information access research.
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This study aims to survey academic users in order to identify their needs and expectations about multilingual information processing when they interact with digital libraries. The…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to survey academic users in order to identify their needs and expectations about multilingual information processing when they interact with digital libraries. The study specifically aims to determine the disparities in needs and expectations when users speak different languages.
Design/methodology/approach
A survey was designed to fill in the gaps in the knowledge about academic users' multilingual needs and expectations for digital libraries. The survey questionnaire incorporates questions about different aspects of the participants' multilingual needs and expectations covering multilingual needs, the multilingual behavior, often‐used multilingual information resources, and desired functions for the multilingual services, retrieval and interfaces in digital libraries. The results are obtained through statistical analyses and clustering methods.
Findings
Overall, participants exhibited many multilingual needs during their academic activities. They often require multilingual information when they access academic databases or web information. Frequently, participants use online translation resources and tools, but they are not satisfied with the translation quality. Participants want many multilingual capabilities in digital libraries; they also want more sophisticated multilingual search interfaces. However, participants from different countries or who speak different languages show significant differences in their multilingual needs and expectations of digital libraries. This study's three user groups demonstrated clear differences in all aspects of multilinguality examined, as did the three latent groups identified through the clustering methods.
Originality/value
Few studies have examined the multilingual information process in digital libraries from the point of view of academic users. This study draws its inputs directly from real academic users from different countries and provides insights into multilinguality in digital libraries.
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Emine Sendurur and Sonja Gabriel
This study aims to discover how domain familiarity and language affect the cognitive load and the strategies applied for the evaluation of search engine results pages (SERP).
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to discover how domain familiarity and language affect the cognitive load and the strategies applied for the evaluation of search engine results pages (SERP).
Design/methodology/approach
This study used an experimental research design. The pattern of the experiment was based upon repeated measures design. Each student was given four SERPs varying in two dimensions: language and content. The criteria of students to decide on the three best links within the SERP, the reasoning behind their selection, and their perceived cognitive load of the given task were the repeated measures collected from each participant.
Findings
The evaluation criteria changed according to the language and task type. The cognitive load was reported higher when the content was presented in English or when the content was academic. Regarding the search strategies, a majority of students trusted familiar sources or relied on keywords they found in the short description of the links. A qualitative analysis showed that students can be grouped into different types according to the reasons they stated for their choices. Source seeker, keyword seeker and specific information seeker were the most common types observed.
Originality/value
This study has an international scope with regard to data collection. Moreover, the tasks and findings contribute to the literature on information literacy.
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Dan Wu, Shu Fan, Shengyi Yao and Shuang Xu
Ethnic minorities (EMs), who make up a sizable proportion of multilingual users, are more likely to browse and search in their native language. It is helpful to identify…
Abstract
Purpose
Ethnic minorities (EMs), who make up a sizable proportion of multilingual users, are more likely to browse and search in their native language. It is helpful to identify multilingual users' information needs to provide public digital cultural services (PDCS) for making their life better.
Design/methodology/approach
The in-context interview is an efficient way to explore EMs' information needs and evoke their daily experience with PDCS. The material from 31 one-on-one interviews with EMs in China was recorded and analyzed using thematic analysis.
Findings
The findings reveal that language proficiency is a critical factor influencing multilingual information access (MLIA) and multilingual users' information needs. Moreover, language ability, digital literacy and cultural literacy are important components of multilingual information literacy (MLIL), which is helpful for EMs to access PDCS. In light of Kochen's theory, the information needs of PDCS can be classified into the aroused need of resources, the recognized need of functions and services and expressed need. For the expressed need, it is necessary to develop a one-stop convergence platform of PDCS to process various requests of resources, functions and services in the future.
Originality/value
The findings will be valuable for governments, public institutions and social organizations in identifying, addressing and resolving these issues about PDCS.
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Asma Al-Wreikat, Pauline Rafferty and Allen Foster
The purpose of this paper is to report the results and the methods of a study which applied grounded theory to the information-seeking behaviour of social scientists when…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to report the results and the methods of a study which applied grounded theory to the information-seeking behaviour of social scientists when searching Arabic and English academic databases using both languages.
Design/methodology/approach
The research applied the grounded theory approach using search experiments and semi-structured interviews. Think-aloud protocol during the experiment was used to capture the data from the subjects to allow a detailed analysis for the experiment. The semi-structured interviews followed each experiment and were analysed using the Strauss and Corbin (1990) version of the grounded theory, as were the think-aloud protocols.
Findings
The results of the think-aloud protocols and the semi-structured interviews suggest that the information needs of the subjects varied depending on the language used. In addition, it was discovered that social scientists followed more tactics in searching the Arabic database for the same tasks searched in English during the experiment. This allowed more search strategies and search tactics to appear in seeking information in Arabic language. The study also proposed a model to account for the cross-language information-seeking behaviour.
Research limitations/implications
This study identifies and compares the information-seeking behaviour of the social scientists in Jordanian universities in searching both Arabic and English academic databases. Therefore, the findings of this study cannot be generalized to other Arab countries, unless there was similar context.
Originality/value
Few studies have investigated information-seeking behaviour using academic Arabic databases and proposed information-seeking behaviour models. No studies have compared information-seeking behaviour when using Arabic and English academic databases. The value of the current study arises by being the first study to identify and compare the information-seeking behaviour of social scientists by using grounded theory and proposing a cross-language information-seeking behaviour model.
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Andrew Large and Haidar Moukdad
The World Wide Web offers access to information resources in many languages. Certain developments facilitate multilingual exploitation of these resources. Some search engines, for…
Abstract
The World Wide Web offers access to information resources in many languages. Certain developments facilitate multilingual exploitation of these resources. Some search engines, for example, allow the user to restrict retrieved sites to those in particular languages; some also provide the searcher with an interface in a chosen language. Many web sites also offer their information in several languages, one of which typically is English. Systran, a machine translation system available from the AltaVista search engine, can even translate a search statement or a retrieved page from one language to another. Despite these features, however, language also creates obstacles to full exploitation of web resources. Not all languages are catered for by these multilingual tools. Machine translation output typically is but a rough and ready version of a human translation. The variety of scripts in which the written forms of the world’s languages appear also create major problems in searching, inputting, displaying and printing text in non‐roman scripts. The paper offers an overview of multilingual information access issues in relation to the Web.
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Marilyn Domas White, Miriam Matteson and Eileen G. Abels
This paper characterizes translation as a task and aims to identify how it influences professional translators' information needs and use of resources to meet those needs.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper characterizes translation as a task and aims to identify how it influences professional translators' information needs and use of resources to meet those needs.
Design/methodology/approach
This research is exploratory and qualitative. Data are based on focus group sessions with 19 professional translators. Where appropriate, findings are related to several theories relating task characteristics and information behavior (IB).
Findings
The findings support some of Byström's findings about relationship between task and information use but also suggest new hypotheses or relationships among task, information need, and information use, including the notion of a zone of familiarity. Translators use a wide range of resources, both formal and informal, localized sources, including personal contacts with other translators, native speakers, and domain experts, to supplement their basic resources, which are different types of dictionaries. The study addresses translator problems created by the need to translate materials in less commonly taught languages.
Research limitations/implications
Focus group sessions allow only for identifying concepts, relationships, and hypotheses, not for indicating the relative importance of variables or distribution across individuals. Translation does not cover literary translation.
Practical implications
The paper suggests content and features of workstations offering access to wide range of resources for professional translators.
Originality/value
Unlike other information behavior studies of professional translators, this article focuses on a broad range of resources, not just on dictionary use. It also identifies information problems associated not only with normal task activities, but also with translators' moving out of their zone of familiarity, i.e. their range of domain, language, and style expertise. The model of translator IB is potentially generalizable to other groups and both supports and expands other task‐related research.
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Social media have increasingly gained credibility as information sources in emergencies. Retweeting or resharing nature has made Twitter a popular medium of information…
Abstract
Purpose
Social media have increasingly gained credibility as information sources in emergencies. Retweeting or resharing nature has made Twitter a popular medium of information dissemination. The purpose of this article is to enhance our understanding of both linguistic style and content properties (i.e. both affective and informational contents) that drives resharing behavior or virality of disaster messages on Twitter. We investigate this issue in the context of natural disaster crisis.
Design/methodology/approach
In this study, the authors develop, drawing upon language expectancy and uncertainty reduction theories as an enabling framework, hypotheses about how the language (i.e. style and content) influence resharing behavior. They employ a natural language processing of disaster tweets to examine how the language – linguistic style (concrete and interactive language) and linguistic content (information- and affect-focused language) – affects resharing behavior on Twitter during natural disasters. To examine the effects of both linguistic style and content factors on virality, a series of negative binomial regressions were conducted, particularly owing to the highly skewed count data.
Findings
Our analysis of tweets from the 2013 Colorado floods shows that resharing disasters tweets increases with the use of concrete language style during acute emergencies. Interactive language is also positively associated with retweet frequency. In addition, neither positive nor negative emotional tweets drive down resharing during acute crises, while information-focused language content has a significantly positive effect on virality.
Practical implications
Agencies for public safety and disaster management or volunteer organizations involved in disseminating crisis and risk information to the public may leverage the impacts of the linguistic style and language content through the lens of our research model. The findings encourage practitioners to focus on the role of linguistic style cues during acute disasters. Specifically, from the uncertainty reduction perspective, using concrete language in the disaster tweets is the expected norm, leading to a higher likelihood of virality. Also, interactively frame disaster tweets are more likely to be diffused to a larger number of people on Twitter.
Originality/value
The language that people use offer important psychological cue to their intentions and motivations. However, the role of language on Twitter has largely been ignored in this crisis communication and few prior studies have examined the relationship between language and virality during acute emergencies. This article explains the complex and multifaceted nature of information resharing behavior using a multi-theoretical approach – including uncertainty reduction and language expectancy theory – to understand effects of language style and content cues on resharing behavior in the context of natural crisis events.
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This publication is based on a research thesis which examined self‐help ethnic minority organisations and their activities in order to construct an accurate picture of the library…
Abstract
This publication is based on a research thesis which examined self‐help ethnic minority organisations and their activities in order to construct an accurate picture of the library and information needs of their members. It identified the kinds of co‐operation that existed between self‐help ethnic minority organisations and public libraries and other relevant official agencies. A series of models for co‐operation that could take place between public libraries, other relevant agencies and self‐help organisations was constructed.