Mining the Query Logs of a Chinese Web Search Engine for Character Usage Analysis

The use of non-English Web search engines has been prevalent. Given the popularity of Chinese Web searching and the unique characteristics of Chinese language, it is imperative to conduct studies with focuses on the analysis of Chinese Web search queries. In this paper, we report our research on the character usage of Chinese search logs from Web search engine in Hong Kong. By examining the distribution of search queries terms, we found that people intended to use more diversified terms and that the usage of characters in search queries was quite different from the character usage of both general online information in Chinese and Web search queries in English. We believe the findings from this study have provided some insights into further research in non-English Web searching and will assist in the design of more effective Chinese Website search engines

Online mathematics enrichment: an evaluation of the NRICH project

This Executive Summary forms part of the final report of the findings of the independent external evaluation of the NRICH online mathematics project. The evaluation was commissioned by the University of Cambridge, UK as represented by the Millennium Mathematics Project. The evaluation was carried out by the evaluation team from the University of Southampton, UK, during 1998-99. Data collection took place between April and September 1999. An interim report, based on one element of the evaluation, was presented at the NRICH conference held in July 1999.1. The NRICH online mathematics enrichment project began in 1996 with the aim of establishing a permanent national UK centre for curriculum enrichment in mathematics. The project aims to provide mathematical learning support for very able children of all ages through the publication of a regular web-based ‘magazines’ featuring mathematical problems, puzzles, articles and games. University mathematics students act as peer teachers providing an electronic answering service. The centre also offers support, advice and inservice training to teachers, and resources for mathematics clubs. The NRICH website can be found at http://nrich.maths.org.uk/2. Internal evaluations of the project, carried out in 1997 and 1998, suggested that an increasing number of people were accessing the NRICH project website. The evaluations also indicated that teachers using the NRICH materials were generally satisfied with the type of problems presented, and that pupils who worked on the problems developed a richer view of mathematics. 3. The objectives of the external evaluation were to assess how the use of the NRICH website facilities enhances the mathematical development of children who have the potential to go on to study mathematical subjects at university, how the features of the website are used by teachers to help meet the special educational needs of exceptionally able children in mathematics, and the particular contribution of Information Communications Technology to the above. These objectives were derived from the aims of the NRICH project.4. The evaluation design incorporated a range of methods to provide data on the evaluation objectives. The various elements of the evaluation were an analysis of the responses to questionnaires completed by pupils, teachers, and other interested parties (such as parents) who access the NRICH website, a critical review of the NRICH website, together with selected case studies of school, classroom and pupil use of the NRICH project facilities. 5. Analysis of questionnaires completed by 199 pupils, 450 teachers, and 67 ‘friends of NRICH’ (such as parents) revealed that most NRICH users lived in England. This was particularly true of teachers. Over two-thirds of the pupils using NRICH were boys. Approximately the same proportion was white. A large proportion of users accessed NRICH at home. The majority of teachers worked in the state sector (both primary and secondary); ten percent were from private schools. The majority of users of all types were relatively new to NRICH, having been accessing the website for six months or less. The most frequent reason for accessing the NRICH website was to use it as a source of interesting mathematical problems. Most users were not registered with NRICH (a no-fee option open to all). The NRICH site was complimented by all categories of user as providing interesting problems, being attractively presented and generally easy to navigate. 6. The NRICH website was judged by the evaluation team to score highly on each of the website evaluation criteria. The new design of the site, launched in July 1999, was judged to be attractive, functional, easy to navigate, and contain high-quality materials. NRICH compared very favourably with other sites that provide mathematical puzzles, games and problems, and/or an answering service. The NRICH server statistics showed an increase in accesses to the site which was likely to be the result of more people accessing the NRICH site more often.7. In each of the three case study schools, at least one teacher made regular and often frequent use of the NRICH website, though none made use of the wider NRICH facilities available to registered teachers. NRICH was mainly used a source of interesting mathematical problems. Pupil usage of NRICH in the schools was much more varied. Only a very few pupils were aware of NRICH and had accessed the site themselves. While there was some evidence of impact on more able pupils, none of the teachers were able to quantify this impact but all praised NRICH as a very valuable resource.8. The three selected case profiles of pupil usage of NRICH revealed that these particular pupils accessed NRICH no more than once a month. All found the ‘one-to-one’ facility, where they could pose questions to University students, helpful and informative. Such exchanges often left the pupils wanting to know more, a situation the pupils viewed as positive. While few of the exchanges were related to the mathematical problems provided on the NRICH site, all these pupils valued the opportunity of being able to ask questions and receive replies.9. The main impact of NRICH on the more able pupils was in terms of helping them to gain a wider appreciation of mathematics and raising the profile of mathematics as a subject that could be interesting enough to pursue either within or outside school or for further study. Quantifying this impact was beyond the scope of this evaluation. Teachers mostly accessed NRICH to find problems to use in their teaching. The teachers used a variety of approaches to meet the needs of their more able pupils. Some used the NRICH problems with groups of more able children withdrawn from their regular classrooms. Some teachers used NRICH problems as extension material once regular classwork was complete. For some, NRICH was one resource amongst many. Only a few organised an extra-curricular mathematics club based solely around NRICH. The contribution of information communications technology (ICT) to both the enhancement of pupils’ mathematical development and to how teachers made use of the NRICH facilities was associated with the functionality and accessibility of the NRICH site. The interaction that was possible through using ICT was seen as a particular advantage of the NRICH project

Navigating the web: a study on professional translators’ behaviour

Despite the importance of online information seeking behaviours being recognised by researchers (Enriquez Raido 2011, 2014, Gough 2015, Hvelplund 2017, 2019), there are only a handful of studies focusing on them. This study therefore sets out to investigate how professional translators conduct their primary action (i.e. query behaviour) and secondary action (i.e. browsing and clicking behaviour) in navigating the web. Unlike previous studies, it adopts a qualitative eye tracking methodology, i.e. eye tracking stimulated think-aloud with ten professional translators. A model of translators’ primary and secondary actions is presented as well as how these actions interact with one another as a result

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)

Information Seeking Behaviour of International and Domestic Students: A Comparative Study

Thesis (Master of Science in Informatics)--University of Tsukuba, no. 37781, 2017.3.2

Navigating the Web: A Qualitative Eye Tracking-based Study of Translators’ Web Search Behaviour

This Element reports an investigation of translators’ use of web-based resources and search engines. The study adopted a qualitative eye tracking-based methodology utilising a combination of gaze replay and retrospective think aloud (RTA) to elicit data. The main contribution of this Element lies in presenting not only an alternative eye tracking methodology for investigating translators’ web search behaviour but also a systematic approach to gauging the reasoning behind translators’ highly complex and context-dependent interaction with search engines and the Web

Navigating the Web. A Qualitative Eye Tracking–Based Study of Translators' Web Search Behaviour

This Element reports an investigation of translators' use of web-based resources and search engines. The study adopted a qualitative eye tracking-based methodology utilising a combination of gaze replay and retrospective think aloud (RTA) to elicit data. The main contribution of this Element lies in presenting not only an alternative eye tracking methodology for investigating translators' web search behaviour but also a systematic approach to gauging the reasoning behind translators' highly complex and context-dependent interaction with search engines and the Web

GAUGING PUBLIC INTEREST FROM SERVER LOGS, SURVEYS AND INLINKS

As the World Wide Web (the Web) has turned into a full-fledged medium to disseminate news, it is very important for journalism and information science researchers to investigate how Web users access online news reports and how to interpret such usage patterns. This doctoral thesis collected and analyzed Web server log statistics, online surveys results, online reprints of the top 50 news reports, as well as external inlinks data of a leading comprehensive online newspaper (the People’s Daily Online) in China, one of the biggest Web/information markets in today’s world. The aim of the thesis was to explore various methods to gauge the public interest from a Webometrics perspective. A total of 129 days of Web server log statistics, including the top 50 Chinese and English news stories with the highest daily pageview numbers, the comments attracted by these news items and the emailed frequencies of the same stories were collected from October 2007 to September 2008. These top 50 news items’positions on the Chinese and English homepages and the top 50 queries submitted to the website search engine of the People’s Daily Online were also retrieved. Results of the two online surveys launched in March 2008 and March 2009 were collected after their respective closing dates. The external inlinks to the People’s Daily Online were retrieved by Yahoo! (Chinese and English versions), and the online reprints were retrieved by Google. Besides the general usage patterns identified from the top 50 news stories, this study, by conducting statistical tests on the data sets, also reveals the following findings. First, the editors’ choices and the readers’ favorites do not always match each other; thus content of news title is more important than its homepage position in attracting online visits. Second, the Chinese and English readers’ interests in the same events are different. Third, the pageview numbers and comments posted to the news items reflect the unfavorable attitudes of the Chinese people toward the United States and Japan, which might offer us a method to investigate the public interest in some other issues or nations after necessary modifications. More importantly, some publicly available data, such as the comments posted to the news stories and online survey results, further show that the pageview measure does reflect readers’ interests/needs truthfully, as proved by the strong correlations between the top news reports and relevant top queries. The external ininks to the news websites and the online reprints of the top news items help us examine readers\u27 interests from other perspectives, as well as establish online profiles of the news websites. Such publicly accessible information could be an alternative data source for researchers to study readers\u27 interests when the Web server log data are not available. This doctoral thesis not only shows the usefulness of Web server log statistics, survey results, and other publicly accessible data in studying Web user’s information needs, but also offers practical suggestions for online news sites to improve their contents and homepage designs. However, no single method can draw a complete picture of the online news readers’ interests. The above mentioned research methodologies should be employed together, in order to make more comprehensive conclusions. Future research is especially needed to investigate the continuously rapid growth of the “Mobile News Readers,” which poses both challenges and opportunities to the press industry in the 21st century