Providing Multilingual Access to Health-Oriented Content

Finding health-related content is not an easy task. People have to know what to search for, which medical terms to use, and where to find accurate information. This task becomes even harder when people such as immigrants wish to find information in their country of residence and do not speak the national language very well. In this paper, we present a new health information system that allows users to search for health information using natural language queries composed of multiple languages. We present the technical details of the system and outline the results of a preliminary user study to demonstrate the usability of the system

Introduction to the special issue on cross-language algorithms and applications

With the increasingly global nature of our everyday interactions, the need for multilingual technologies to support efficient and efective information access and communication cannot be overemphasized. Computational modeling of language has been the focus of Natural Language Processing, a subdiscipline of Artificial Intelligence. One of the current challenges for this discipline is to design methodologies and algorithms that are cross-language in order to create multilingual technologies rapidly. The goal of this JAIR special issue on Cross-Language Algorithms and Applications (CLAA) is to present leading research in this area, with emphasis on developing unifying themes that could lead to the development of the science of multi- and cross-lingualism. In this introduction, we provide the reader with the motivation for this special issue and summarize the contributions of the papers that have been included. The selected papers cover a broad range of cross-lingual technologies including machine translation, domain and language adaptation for sentiment analysis, cross-language lexical resources, dependency parsing, information retrieval and knowledge representation. We anticipate that this special issue will serve as an invaluable resource for researchers interested in topics of cross-lingual natural language processing.Postprint (published version

Multilingual adaptive search for digital libraries

This paper describes a framework for Adaptive Multilingual Information Retrieval (AMIR) which allows multilingual resource discovery and delivery using on-the-fly machine translation of documents and queries. Result documents are presented to the user in a contextualised manner. Challenges and affordances of both Adaptive and Multilingual IR, with a particular focus on Digital Libraries, are detailed. The framework components are motivated by a series of results from experiments on query logs and documents from The European Library. We conclude that factoring adaptivity and multilinguality aspects into the search process can enhance the user’s experience with online Digital Libraries

Content creation and E-learning in Indian Languages : a model

In the era of E-publishing and E-learning, numerous universities and cultural organizations around the world have launched initiatives to develop tools for multilingual learning and web publishing and have given preference to local content. India has different languages and different culture. Most of the knowledge and information related to people, culture, science and philosophy of India is available in Indian languages, which will be useful for learning and developing knowledge base. In India E-learning systems and online courses are already started, but as a multi lingual country, which gives importance to education through regional languages, there should be facilities for multi lingual E-learning. This paper covers the issues of Indian language knowledge base/content base, its requirement, and its implication in e learning. An Integrated multi lingual E-learning system for India is proposed in this paper, where importance given to multi lingual course content creation

Which user interaction for cross-language information retrieval? Design issues and reflections

A novel and complex form of information access is cross-language information retrieval: searching for texts written in foreign languages based on native language queries. Although the underlying technology for achieving such a search is relatively well understood, the appropriate interface design is not. The authors present three user evaluations undertaken during the iterative design of Clarity, a cross-language retrieval system for low-density languages, and shows how the user-interaction design evolved depending on the results of usability tests. The first test was instrumental to identify weaknesses in both functionalities and interface; the second was run to determine if query translation should be shown or not; the final was a global assessment and focused on user satisfaction criteria. Lessons were learned at every stage of the process leading to a much more informed view of what a cross-language retrieval system should offer to users

Considering subjects and scenarios in large-scale user-centered evaluation of a multilingual multimodal medical search system

Medical search applications can be required to service the differing information needs of multiple classes of users with varying medical knowledge levels, and language skills, as well as varying querying behaviours. The precise nature of these users' needs has to be understood to develop effective applications. Evaluation of developed search applications requires creation of holistic user-centred evaluation approaches which allow for comprehensive evaluation while being mindful of the diversity of users

Which User Interaction for Cross-Language Information Retrieval? Design Issues and Reflections

A novel and complex form of information access is cross-language information retrieval: searching for texts written in foreign languages based on native language queries. Although the underlying technology for achieving such a search is relatively well understood, the appropriate interface design is not. This paper presents three user evaluations undertaken during the iterative design of Clarity, a cross-language retrieval system for rare languages, and shows how the user interaction design evolved depending on the results of usability tests. The first test was instrumental to identify weaknesses in both functionalities and interface; the second was run to determine if query translation should be shown or not; the final was a global assessment and focussed on user satisfaction criteria. Lessons were learned at every stage of the process leading to a much more informed view of what a cross-language retrieval system should offer to users

A Word Sense-Oriented User Interface for Interactive Multilingual Text Retrieval

In this paper we present an interface for supporting a user in an interactive cross-language search process using semantic classes. In order to enable users to access multilingual information, different problems have to be solved: disambiguating and translating the query words, as well as categorizing and presenting the results appropriately. Therefore, we first give a brief introduction to word sense disambiguation, cross-language text retrieval and document categorization and finally describe recent achievements of our research towards an interactive multilingual retrieval system. We focus especially on the problem of browsing and navigation of the different word senses in one source and possibly several target languages. In the last part of the paper, we discuss the developed user interface and its functionalities in more detail

Initial specification of the evaluation tasks "Use cases to bridge validation and benchmarking" PROMISE Deliverable 2.1

Evaluation of multimedia and multilingual information access systems needs to be performed from a usage oriented perspective. This document outlines use cases from the three use case domains of the PROMISE project and gives some initial pointers to how their respective characteristics can be extrapolated to determine and guide evaluation activities, both with respect to benchmarking and to validation of the usage hypotheses. The use cases will be developed further during the course of the evaluation activities and workshops projected to occur in coming CLEF conferences