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The purpose of this paper is to identify criteria according to which e-dictionaries can be evaluated. Information technology can be used to enhance e-dictionaries, but if not done carefully, information tools that completely overwhelm a user with irrelevant information can be developed. Criteria are necessary according to which e-dictionaries can be developed and evaluated to ensure tools that only provide relevant information on demand.

A literature review was conducted to identify trends in lexicography and modern information technology. Previous usability studies were considered to identify key usability issues. The information was synthesised to identify a set of criteria.

It was found the e-dictionaries should be evaluated according to their content, information architecture, navigation, access (searching and browsing), help, customisation and use of other innovative technologies.

A comprehensive set of criteria has been identified that can be used to evaluate e-dictionaries and to guide lexicographers in the development of e-dictionaries.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the heuristic evaluations of five e-dictionaries according to the criteria developed by Ball and Bothma (2018). E-dictionaries are increasingly making use of modern information technology to create advanced information tools. It is necessary to ensure that these new products are still usable. Heuristic evaluation is a usability evaluation method used to evaluate the usability of a product.

Five e-dictionaries were evaluated through heuristic evaluation. This method requires an evaluator to evaluate a product by using a set of criteria or guidelines.

Various usability issues, as well as good features of e-dictionaries, could be identified through these evaluations, and are discussed under the categories of content, information architecture, navigation, access (searching and browsing), help, customisation and use of other innovative technologies.

Through the evaluations in this study, the criteria could be validated and an example of how the criteria can be used to evaluate e-dictionaries could be presented.

Needs for information literacy, disparities in society, bridging digital divides, richness of information sources in electronic (e-)environments and the value of dictionaries have often been propagated. To improve information sources and information literacy training, information behaviour must be understood (i.e. all information activities). This paper conceptualises new opportunities for information sources (e.g. electronic dictionaries) to all society sectors, dictionary literacy and research lenses such as lexicography to supplement information literacy and behaviour research.

A scoping review of information literacy and behaviour, lexicography and dictionary literature grounds the conceptualisation of dictionary literacy, its alignment with information literacy, information activities and information behaviour and lexicography as additional research lens.

Research lenses must acknowledge dictionary use in e-environments, information activities and skills, meanings of information and dictionary literacy, the value of e-dictionaries, alignment with information behaviour research that guides the development of information sources and interdisciplinary research from, e.g. lexicography – thus contextualisation.

Research implications – information behaviour and information literacy research can be enriched by lexicography as research lens. Further conceptualisation could align information behaviour, information literacy and dictionary literacy.

Dictionary training, aligned with information literacy training, can be informed by this paper.

The value of dictionary literacy for all sectors of societies can be improved.

Large bodies of literature on information behaviour and lexicography individually do not cover combined insights from both.

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 develop a system, which would enable efficient management and exploitation of documentation in electronic form, related to mining projects, with information retrieval and information extraction (IE) features, using various language resources and natural language processing.

The system is designed to integrate textual, lexical, semantic and terminological resources, enabling advanced document search and extraction of information. These resources are integrated with a set of Web services and applications, for different user profiles and use-cases.

The use of the system is illustrated by examples demonstrating keyword search supported by Web query expansion services, search based on regular expressions, corpus search based on local grammars, followed by extraction of information based on this search and finally, search with lexical masks using domain and semantic markers.

The presented system is the first software solution for implementation of human language technology in management of documentation from the mining engineering domain, but it is also applicable to other engineering and non-engineering domains. The system is independent of the type of alphabet (Cyrillic and Latin), which makes it applicable to other languages of the Balkan region related to Serbian, and its support for morphological dictionaries can be applied in most morphologically complex languages, such as Slavic languages. Significant search improvements and the efficiency of IE are based on semantic networks and terminology dictionaries, with the support of local grammars.

A hybrid approach is presented, which combines linguistic and statistical information to semi-automatically extract multiword term candidates from texts.

The method is designed to be domain and language independent, focusing on languages with rich morphology. Here, it is used for extracting multiword terms from texts in Serbian, belonging to the agricultural engineering domain, as a use case. Predefined syntactic structures were used for multiword terms. For each structure, a finite state transducer was developed, which recognizes text sequences having that structure and outputs the sequence in a normalized form, so that different inflectional forms of the same multiword term can be counted properly. Term candidates were further filtered by their frequencies and evaluated by two domain experts.

By using language resources, such as electronic dictionaries and grammars, 928 multiword terms were extracted out of 1,523 multiword terms that were recognized as candidates from a corpus having 42,260 different simple word forms; 870 of these were new, not already contained in the existing electronic dictionary of compounds for Serbian, and they were used to enrich the dictionary.

The paper presents methodology that can significantly contribute to the development of terminology lexicons in different areas. In this particular use case, some important agricultural engineering concepts were extracted from the text, but this approach could be used for other domains and languages as well.

This paper aims to develop a model to predict online review ratings from multiple sources, which can be used to detect fraudulent reviews and create proprietary rating indexes, or which can be used as a measure of selection in recommender systems.

This study applies machine learning and natural language processing approaches to combine features derived from the qualitative component of a review with the corresponding quantitative component and, therefore, generate a richer review rating.

Experiments were performed over a collection of hotel online reviews – written in English, Spanish and Portuguese – which shows a significant improvement over the previously reported results, and it not only demonstrates the scientific value of the approach but also strengthens the value of review prediction applications in the business environment.

This study shows the importance of building predictive models for revenue management and the application of the index generated by the model. It also demonstrates that, although difficult and challenging, it is possible to achieve valuable results in the application of text analysis across multiple languages.

The Department of Information Science at the University of Pretoria (UP), with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, has, for the past six years, offered a fully funded specialized two-year coursework degree at Masters’ level in Information Technology (M.IT degree). The purpose of this paper is to discuss the technological and teaching methodologies as well as the unique advantages and challenges of collaboration between four partner institutions on two continents as well as local industry partners and local and international academic and public libraries, in offering a blended learning program to students from six different countries.

The contribution is based on a pragmatic and reflective analysis of the success of the strategic partnerships formed during the M.IT program. The data-gathering instrument used was a questionnaire containing open-ended questions.

Analysis of the comments shows that it is evident that faculty still prefer face-to-face classes. Furthermore, to experience an effective online blended learning, the technology would have to improve. The complicated levels of partnerships were important to provide the necessary expertise for this broad-based program. Lecturers from industries and libraries brought different perspectives based on their day-to-day work and practical experience and, through this, a level of reality as opposed to the theory that can be learnt from textbooks.

This is a descriptive analysis of the program and feedback of co-workers that has not been reported before.

The purpose of this paper is to present the fact that electronic resources are a significant part of library collections. A large amount is invested in the development and management of e‐resources in the libraries. The study aims to identify the acceptance of e‐resources in the National Social Science Documentation Centre (NASSDOC) library in New Delhi, India and determine their usage, performance, degree of user satisfaction, and barriers faced in the access of e‐resources. It also attempts to find out the users' views about computer literacy among the social scientists.

The study focuses on the impact and use of e‐resources by social scientists pursuing research in the NASSDOC library. The data were collected from the entire population of social scientists at NASSDOC through a questionnaire accompanied by personal interview. This was further analysed using statistical techniques and percentages to arrive at qualitative and quantitative results.

The major findings of the study indicate that respondents are aware of the e‐resources (such as e‐books, e‐journals, e‐encyclopedias, e‐theses, CD‐ROM databases, e‐mail, internet and the OPAC). Large numbers of research scholars and faculty members are using these e‐resources for their research work. Many faculty members strongly agreed with the necessity for computer and internet literacy to access information. A majority of users were satisfied with the e‐resources available at the NASSDOC library.

This is one of the first surveys conducted to identify the need and importance of e‐resources in a specific Indian library (NASSDOC) as well as the requirement for information literacy to enhance the use of available resources in the social sciences. It should pave the way to showing the value of such e‐resources for scholarly research in India.