Levelling the Playing Field: A Genre Analysis of Online Search Language and Behaviour in UK Higher Education

This study examines the impact of non-native language speakers on their academic search queries, strategies and performance. Screen recordings and retrospective think aloud interviews were conducted with both native and non-native speakers. Based on a combined application of genre analysis and mapping of the participants’ query formulations and interactions, this research derives 4 distinct strands to an established model of the information search process. Key differences in the searches are highlighted and the use of search genre for accommodating all university students are discussed

Multilingual Information Access: Practices and Perceptions of Bi/multilingual Academic Users

The research reported in this dissertation explored linguistic determinants in online information searching, and examined to what extent bi/multilingual academic users utilize Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) tools and what impact these have on their information searching behavior. The aim of the study was three-pronged: to provide tangible data that can support recommendations for the effective user-centered design of Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR) systems; to provide a user-centered evaluation of existing MLIA tools, and to offer the basis of a framework for Library & Information Science (LIS) professionals in teaching information literacy and library skills for bi/multilingual academic users. In the first phase of the study, 250 bi/multilingual students participated in a web survey that investigated their language choices while searching for information on the internet and electronic databases. 31 of these participants took part in the second phase which involved a controlled lab-based user experiment and post experiment questionnaire that investigated their use of MLIA tools on Google and WorldCat and their opinions of these tools. In the third phase, 19 students participated in focus groups discussions and 6 librarians were interviewed to find out their perspectives on multilingual information literacy. Results showed that though machine translation has alleviated some of the linguistic related challenges in online information searching, language barriers do still exist for some users especially at the query formulation stage. Captures from the experiment revealed great diversity in the way MLIA tools were utilized while the focus group discussions and interviews revealed a general lack of awareness by both librarians and students of the tools that could help enhance and promote multilingual information literacy. The study highlights the roles of both IR system designers as well as LIS professionals in enhancing and promoting multilingual information access and literacy: User- centered design, user-modeling were found to be key aspects in the development of more effective multilingual information retrieval (MLIR) systems. The study also highlights the distinction between being multilingually information literate and being multilingual information literate. Suitable models for instruction for bi/multilingual academic users point towards Specialized Information Literacy Instruction (SILI) and Personalized Information Literacy Instruction (PILI)

Characterizing and Evaluating Users' Information Seeking Behavior in Social Tagging Systems

Social tagging systems in the Web 2.0 era present an innovative information seeking environment succeeding the library and traditional Web. The primary goals of this study were to, in this particular context: (1) identify the general information seeking strategies adopted by users and determine their effectiveness; (2) reveals the characteristics of the users who prefer different strategies; and (3) identify the specific traits of users' information seeking paths and understand factors shaping them. A representative social tagging system, Douban (http://www.douban.com/) was chosen as the research setting in order to generate empirical findings.Based on the mixed methods research design, this study consists of a quantitative phase and a qualitative phase. The former firstly involved a clickstream data analysis of 20 million clickstream records requested from Douban at the footprint, movement, and track levels. Limited to studying physical behavior, it was complemented by an online survey which captured Douban users' background information from various aspects. In the subsequent qualitative phase, a focus group gathered a number of experienced Douban users to help interpret the quantitative results.Major findings of this study show that: (1) the general strategies include encountering, browsing by resource, browsing by tag, browsing by user/group, searching, and monitoring by user/group; (2) while browsing by resource is the most popular strategy, browsing by tag is the most effective one; (3) users preferring different strategies do not have significantly different characteristics; and (4) on users' information seeking paths these exist two resource viewing patterns - continuous and sporadic, and two resource collecting patterns - lagged and instant, and they can be attributed to user, task, and system factors.A model was developed to illustrate the strategic and tactic layers of users' information seeking behavior in social tagging systems. It offers a deep insight into the behavioral changes brought about by this new environment as compared to the Web in general. This model can serve as the theoretical base for designing user-oriented information seeking interfaces for social tagging systems so that the general strategies and specific tactics will be accommodated efficiently

Mnews: A Study of Multilingual News Search Interfaces

With the global expansion of the Internet and the World Wide Web, users are becoming increasingly diverse, particularly in terms of languages. In fact, the number of polyglot Web users across the globe has increased dramatically. However, even such multilingual users often continue to suffer from unbalanced and fragmented news information, as traditional news access systems seldom allow users to simultaneously search for and/or compare news in different languages, even though prior research results have shown that multilingual users make significant use of each of their languages when searching for information online. Relatively little human-centered research has been conducted to better understand and support multilingual user abilities and preferences. In particular, in the fields of cross-language and multilingual search, the majority of research has focused primarily on improving retrieval and translation accuracy, while paying comparably less attention to multilingual user interaction aspects. The research presented in this thesis provides the first large-scale investigations of multilingual news consumption and querying/search result selection behaviors, as well as a detailed comparative analysis of polyglots’ preferences and behaviors with respect to different multilingual news search interfaces on desktop and mobile platforms. Through a set of 4 phases of user studies, including surveys, interviews, as well as task-based user studies using crowdsourcing and laboratory experiments, this thesis presents the first human-centered studies in multilingual news access, aiming to drive the development of personalized multilingual news access systems to better support each individual user

Application of the Markov Chain Method in a Health Portal Recommendation System

This study produced a recommendation system that can effectively recommend items on a health portal. Toward this aim, a transaction log that records users’ traversal activities on the Medical College of Wisconsin’s HealthLink, a health portal with a subject directory, was utilized and investigated. This study proposed a mixed-method that included the transaction log analysis method, the Markov chain analysis method, and the inferential analysis method. The transaction log analysis method was applied to extract users’ traversal activities from the log. The Markov chain analysis method was adopted to model users’ traversal activities and then generate recommendation lists for topics, articles, and Q&A items on the health portal. The inferential analysis method was applied to test whether there are any correlations between recommendation lists generated by the proposed recommendation system and recommendation lists ranked by experts. The topics selected for this study are Infections, the Heart, and Cancer. These three topics were the three most viewed topics in the portal. The findings of this study revealed the consistency between the recommendation lists generated from the proposed system and the lists ranked by experts. At the topic level, two topic recommendation lists generated from the proposed system were consistent with the lists ranked by experts, while one topic recommendation list was highly consistent with the list ranked by experts. At the article level, one article recommendation list generated from the proposed system was consistent with the list ranked by experts, while 14 article recommendation lists were highly consistent with the lists ranked by experts. At the Q&A item level, three Q&A item recommendation lists generated from the proposed system were consistent with the lists ranked by experts, while 12 Q&A item recommendation lists were highly consistent with the lists ranked by experts. The findings demonstrated the significance of users’ traversal data extracted from the transaction log. The methodology applied in this study proposed a systematic approach to generating the recommendation systems for other similar portals. The outcomes of this study can facilitate users’ navigation, and provide a new method for building a recommendation system that recommends items at three levels: the topic level, the article level, and the Q&A item level

Concordancing Software in Practice: An investigation of searches and translation problems across EU official languages

2011/2012The present work reports on an empirical study aimed at investigating translation problems across multiple language pairs. In particular, the analysis is aimed at developing a methodological approach to study concordance search logs taken as manifestations of translation problems and, in a wider perspective, information needs. As search logs are a relatively unexplored data type within translation process research, a controlled environment was needed in order to carry out this exploratory analysis without incurring in additional problems caused by an excessive amount of variables. The logs were collected at the European Commission and contain a large volume of searches from English into 20 EU languages that staff translators working for the EU translation services submitted to an internally available multilingual concordancer. The study attempts to (i) identify differences in the searches (i.e. problems) based on the language pairs; and (ii) group problems into types. Furthermore, the interactions between concordance users and the tool itself have been examined to provide a translation-oriented perspective on the domain of Human-Computer Interaction. The study draws on the literature on translation problems, Information Retrieval and Web search log analysis, moving from the assumption that in the perspective of concordance searching, translation problems are best interpreted as information needs for which the concordancer is chosen as a form of external support. The structure of a concordance search is examined in all its parts and is eventually broken down into two main components: the 'Search Strategy' component and the 'Problem Unit' component. The former was further analyzed using a mainly quantitative approach, whereas the latter was addressed from a more qualitative perspective. The analysis of the Problem Unit takes into account the length of the search strings as well as their content and linguistic form, each addressed with a different methodological approach. Based on the understanding of concordance searches as manifestations of translation problems, a user- centered classification of translation-oriented information needs is developed to account for as many "problem" scenarios as possible. According to the initial expectations, different languages should experience different problems. This assumption could not be verified: the 20 different language pairs considered in this study behaved consistently on many levels and, due to the specific research environment, no definite conclusions could be reached as regards the role of the language family criterion for problem identification. The analysis of the 'Problem Unit' component has highlighted automatized support for translating Named Entities as a possible area for further research in translation technology and the development of computer-based translation support tools. Finally, the study indicates (concordance) search logs as an additional data type to be used in experiments on the translation process and for triangulation purposes, while drawing attention on the concordancer as a type of translation aid to be further fine-tuned for the needs of professional translators. ***Il presente lavoro consiste in uno studio empirico sui problemi di traduzione che emergono quando si considerano diverse coppie di lingue e in particolare sviluppa una metodologia per analizzare i log di ricerche effettuate dai traduttori in un software di concordanza (concordancer) quali manifestazioni di problemi di traduzione che, visti in una prospettiva più ampia, si possono anche considerare dei "bisogni d'informazione" (information needs). I log di ricerca costituiscono una tipologia di dato ancora relativamente nuova e inesplorata nell'ambito delle ricerche sul processo di traduzione e pertanto è emersa la necessità di svolgere un'analisi di tipo esplorativo in un contesto controllato onde evitare le problematiche aggiuntive derivanti da un numero eccessivo di variabili. I log di ricerca sono stati raccolti presso la Commissione europea e contengono quantitativi ingenti di ricerche effettuate dai traduttori impiegati presso i servizi di traduzione dell'Unione europea in un concordancer multilingue disponibile come risorsa interna. L'analisi si propone di individuare le differenze nelle ricerche (e quindi nei problemi) a seconda della coppia di lingue selezionata e di raggruppare tali problemi in tipologie. Lo studio fornisce inoltre informazioni sulle modalità di interazione tra gli utenti e il software nell'ambito di un contesto traduttivo, contribuendo alla ricerca nel campo dell'interazione uomo-macchina (Human-Computer Interaction). Il presente studio trae spunto dalla letteratura sui problemi di traduzione, sull'estrazione d'informazioni (Information Retrieval) e sulle ricerche nel Web e si propone di considerare i problemi di traduzione associati all'impiego di uno strumento per le concordanze quali bisogni di informazione per i quali lo strumento di concordanze è stato scelto come forma di supporto esterna. Ogni singola ricerca è stata esaminata e scomposta in due elementi principali: la "strategia di ricerca" (Search Strategy) e l'"unità problematica" (Problem Unit) che vengono studiati rispettivamente usando approcci prevalentemente di tipo quantitativo e qualitativo. L'analisi dell'unità problematica prende in considerazione la lunghezza, il contenuto e la forma linguistica delle stringhe, analizzando ciascuna con una metodologia di lavoro appositamente studiata. Avendo interpretato le ricerche di concordanze quali manifestazioni di bisogni d'informazione, l'analisi prosegue con la definizione di una serie di categorie di bisogni d'informazione (o problemi) legati alla traduzione e incentrati sul singolo utente al fine di includere quanti più scenari di ricerca possibile. L'assunto iniziale in base al quale lingue diverse manifesterebbero problemi diversi non è stato verificato empiricamente in quanto le 20 coppie di lingue esaminate hanno mostrato comportamenti alquanto similari nei diversi livelli di analisi. Vista la peculiarità dei dati utilizzati e la specificità dell'Unione europea come contesto di ricerca, non è stato possibile ottenere conclusioni definitive in merito al ruolo delle famiglie linguistiche quali indicatori di problemi, rispetto ad altri criteri di classificazione. L'analisi dell'unità problematica ha evidenziato le entità denominate (Named Entities) quale possibile oggetto di futuri progetti di ricerca nell'ambito delle tecnologie della traduzione. Oltre a offrire un contributo per i futuri sviluppi nell'ambito dei supporti informatici alla traduzione, con il presente studio si è voluto altresì presentare i log delle ricerche (di concordanze) quale tipologia aggiuntiva di dati per lo studio del processo di traduzione e per la triangolazione dei risultati empirico-sperimentali, cercando anche di suggerire possibili tratti migliorativi dei software di concordanza sulla base dei bisogni di informazione riscontrati nei traduttori.XXV Ciclo198