Multilingual Information Research Articles

КОММУНИКАТИВНО-ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТНАЯ МЕТОДИКА ОБУЧЕНИЯ УСТНОМУ РЕФЕРИРОВАНИЮ (Cognitive and Activity Approach to Teaching Text Reviewing)

Russian abstract: В данной статье рассмотрена когнитивно-деятельностная методика обучения устному реферированию иноязычного текста студентов, обучающихся по программам бакалавриата и магистратуры. Умение ориентироваться в современной многоязычной информационной среде представляет собой неотъемлемый составной элемент профессиограммы управленца, политолога, международника. В статье предложено определение реферирования, описана психолингвистическая модель данной деятельности, на основе которой разработан алгоритм практических действий студентов при реферативном чтении иноязычного текста, переработки и компрессии его содержания с учётом требований, предъявляемых к рефератам, и последующем устном изложении на английском языке полученного в результате смысловой компрессии текста. Предлагается краткая инструкция на английском языке по устному реферированию для студентов English Abstract: The article considers a cognitive and activity approach to teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students text reviewing. The competence to navigate the modern multilingual information environment is integral to the job profile of a manager, political scientist, international relations expert. The article defines what oral reviewing of a literary and newspaper text is. It presents the psycholinguistic model and the practical algorithm of oral reviewing. Concise practical guidelines for students on delivering oral reviews of texts compiled by the authors are described.

Access to cardiac rehabilitation and the role of language barriers in the provision of cardiac rehabilitation to migrants

BackgroundCardiac rehabilitation (CR) has proven health benefits and, according to international guidelines, CR must be offered to all eligible patients. Studies have reported lower uptake of CR among migrants, and migrants are known to face several barriers in their access to healthcare, of which language is the most common. The aim of this study is to examine the provision of CR core components for migrants; and the role of language barriers in the provision of CR in Danish hospitals and municipalities.MethodsThis is a descriptive study based on repeated nationwide surveys conducted in 2013 and 2015 by the Danish Cardiac Rehabilitation Database. The surveys collected information on provision and organization of CR in hospitals (n = 35) and municipalities (n = 98) in Denmark. The survey in 2015 had additional items related to migrants, such as provision of interpreter services and multilingual information material.ResultsNot all CR core components were provided by hospitals to non-Danish speaking patients. There was no improvement from 2013 to 2015. Hospitals had full coverage (19/19) of interpreter services compared to 84% (26/31) of municipalities. Provision of multilingual information material was low in hospitals 32% (6/19) and in municipalities 3% (1/31).ConclusionThis study found language-related barriers in migrants’ access to CR, in the form of inadequate provision of CR core components for non-Danish speaking patients at some Danish hospitals and suboptimal provision of interpreter services in municipalities. The findings call for increased attention to language barriers and further studies are needed to map the extent of the problem.

Language-Independent Type Inference of the Instances from Multilingual Wikipedia

Extracting knowledge from Wikipedia has attracted much attention in recent ten years. One of the most valuable kinds of knowledge is type information, which refers to the axioms stating that an instance is of a certain type. Current approaches for inferring the types of instances from Wikipedia mainly rely on some language-specific rules. Since these rules cannot catch the semantic associations between instances and classes (i.e. candidate types), it may lead to mistakes and omissions in the process of type inference. The authors propose a new approach leveraging attributes to perform language-independent type inference of the instances from Wikipedia. The proposed approach is applied to the whole English and Chinese Wikipedia, which results in the first version of MulType (Multilingual Type Information), a knowledge base describing the types of instances from multilingual Wikipedia. Experimental results show that not only the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art comparison methods, but also MulType contains lots of new and high-quality type information.

A comprehensive survey on cross-language information retrieval system

Cross language information retrieval (CLIR) is a retrieval process in which the user fires queries in one language to retrieve information from another (different) language. The diversity of information and language barriers are the serious issues for communication and cultural exchange across the world. To solve such barriers, Cross language information retrieval system, are nowadays in strong demand. CLIR is a subset of Information Retrieval (IR) system. Information Retrieval deals with finding useful information from a large collection of unstructured, structured and semi-structured data to a user query where the query is a set of keywords. Information Retrieval can be classified into different classes such as Monolingual information retrieval, Bi-Lingual Information Retrieval, Multilingual information retrieval and Cross language information retrieval. This paper focuses on the various IR variants and techniques used in CLIR system. Further, based on available literature, a number of challenges and issues in CLIR have been identified and discussed. It gives an overview of the advantages, limitations, tools available in CLIR research. It also describes new application areas of CLIR such as medical, multimedia, question answering system etc. The need for exploring and building more specialized information system that enable speakers of an Odia language to discover valuable information beyond linguistic and cultural barriers. This study is aimed at building an experimental CLIR system between one of the under-resourced language (i.e. Odia) and one of the most commonly used online language (i.e. English) in future.

A learning to rank approach for cross-language information retrieval exploiting multiple translation resources

AbstractCross-language information retrieval (CLIR), finding information in one language in response to queries expressed in another language, has attracted much attention due to the explosive growth of multilingual information in the World Wide Web. One important issue in CLIR is how to apply monolingual information retrieval (IR) methods in cross-lingual environments. Recently, learning to rank (LTR) approach has been successfully employed in different IR tasks. In this paper, we use LTR for CLIR. In order to adapt monolingual LTR techniques in CLIR and pass the barrier of language difference, we map monolingual IR features to CLIR ones using translation information extracted from different translation resources. The performance of CLIR is highly dependent on the size and quality of available bilingual resources. Effective use of available resources is especially important in low-resource language pairs. In this paper, we further propose an LTR-based method for combining translation resources in CLIR. We have studied the effectiveness of the proposed approach using different translation resources. Our results also show that LTR can be used to successfully combine different translation resources to improve the CLIR performance. In the best scenario, the LTR-based combination method improves the performance of single-resource-based CLIR method by 6% in terms of Mean Average Precision.

Toward multi-lingual information retrieval system based on internet linguistic diversity measurement

Abstract We introduce a method for measuring the quantity of online content of a set of languages at domain level. This measurement is used for building a Multi-Lingual Information Retrieval (MLIR) system that identifies which languages are strongly represented on the internet about a specific query topic. The system architecture includes two modules; the off-line module builds a linguistic diversity index for languages at topic level and the on-line module, where the suitable language for search is identified based the index for retrieving the relevant documents to the user query in that language. The conducted experiments explore the usefulness of building such an index and its usage effect on both of monolingual and traditional MLIR system. From the obtained results, it has been proven that the more internet resources, the better the accuracy of the retrieved results, and therefore the better the system performance.

A Hybrid of Sentence-Level Approach and Fragment-Level Approach of Parallel Text Extraction from Comparable Text

Parallel texts are essential resources in linguistics, natural language processing, and multilingual information retrieval. Many studies attempt to extract parallel text from existing resources, particularly from comparable texts. The approaches to extract parallel text from comparable text can be divided into sentence-level approach and fragment-level approach. In this paper, an approach that combines sentence-level approach and fragment-level approach is proposed. The study was evaluated using statistical machine translation (SMT) and neural machine translation (NMT). The experiment results show a very significant improvement in the BLEU scores of SMT and NMT. The BLEU scores for SMT for the test in computer science domain and news domain increase from 17.45 and 41.45 to 18.56 and 48.65 respectively. On the other hand, the BLEU scores for NMT in the computer science domain and news domain increase from 14.42 and 19.39 to 21.17 and 41.75 respectively.

ПРИВАТНІ МУЗЕЇ КИЄВА: ҐЕНЕЗА, ІСТОРИЧНА ЕВОЛЮЦІЯ, СУЧАСНИЙ СТАН

Мета дослідження. Визначити та обґрунтувати етапи становлення й розвитку приватних музеїв Києва, формування та функціонування яких значною мірою залежить від середовища та потреб, яке його оточує. Методологія дослідження. Використано методи історичного, дедуктивного, мистецтвознавчого, порівняльного аналізу та синтезу. Наукова новизна. Після здобуття незалежності України, з’явилися сучасні приватні музеї в місті Києві, через які є можливість пізнавати культуру, виховувати патріотизм, відчувати дух народу. Однак, їх статус та функціонування є не достатньо висвітлений у науковій літературі. Встановлено, що сьогодення вимагає від музеїв, і, зокрема, приватних музеїв Києва, формування нового підходу до своєї роботи: інтерактивних експозицій, активної співпраці з мас-медіа, громадськими організаціями, різними фундаціями, сучасної рекламної діяльності, активного впровадження в систему Інтернет інформації про діяльність музеїв, їх збірок, окремих музейних пам’яток, що мають національне, європейське, світове значення. Висновки. Розкрито роль приватних музеїв міста Києва у формоутворенні музейного простору, що є важливим елементом збереження й дослідження мистецтва. Запропоновано для покращення розвитку приватних музеїв Києва розвивати інноваційний напрямок (музейний маркетинг, музейний менеджмент, фандрайзинг, PR-технології, застосування новітніх технологій, проект як специфічна форма діяльності музею). Покращувати міжнародну співпрацю (створення інтернаціональних цифрових ресурсів, багатомовний інформаційний супровід експозицій, підвищення кваліфікації працівників музею, туризм). Удосконалювати інформаційно-технологічний напрямок (реклама, фотофіксація, електронна база музею, мережа Internet, видавництво, відеоекскурсії, аудіогід, телебачення, радіо, інформаційні засоби для людей з інвалідністю тощо). Це все дозволить приватним музеям Києва забезпечити можливість безперешкодного доступу населення до надбань вітчизняної й світової культури.

Multi-lingual and multi-cultural information literacy: perspectives, models and good practice

PurposeThis paper aims to review current approaches to, and good practice in, information literacy (IL) development in multi-lingual and multi-cultural settings, with particular emphasis on provision for international students.Design/methodology/approachA selective and critical review of published literature is extended by evaluation of examples of multi-lingual IL tutorials and massive open online courses.FindingsMulti-lingual literacy and multi-cultural IL are umbrella terms covering a variety of situations and issues. This provision is of increasing importance in an increasingly mobile and multi-cultural world. This paper evaluates current approaches and good practice, focussing on issues of culture vis-à-vis language; the balance between individual and group needs; specific and generic IL instruction; and models for IL, pedagogy and culture. Recommendations for good practice and for further research are given.Originality/valueThis is one of very few papers critically reviewing how IL development is affected by linguistic and cultural factors.

Text mining of tourism preference in a multilingual site

There is a huge demand on multilingual tourism information of Japan because of the increasing number of tourists from foreign countries. Most of them may expect typical and stereotyped culture, nature, and modern society of Japan. However, people from different backgrounds, cultures, and languages might expect different aspects of Japan, as well. In this paper, we analyze these kinds of differences as the cultural tourism preference for Japan. We propose a machine‐learning‐based method to figure out the cultural tourism preference of people of different countries based on comparing the access logs to a multilingual tourism information site in different languages. We focus our discussion on the pages accessed in Thai and Vietnamese languages. Our research result shows that for Thai tourists the characteristic features are the famous places in an area and local specialties, but Vietnamese tourists pay much more attention to facilities and location of hotels. This difference was not observable by naive extraction of keywords and their visualization. This result has been used as a guide to the further creation of content in the tourism information site. © 2018 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

A Multimodal Analytics Platform for Journalists Analyzing Large-Scale, Heterogeneous Multilingual, and Multimedia Content.

Analysts and journalists face the problem of having to deal with very large, heterogeneous, and multilingual data volumes that need to be analyzed, understood, and aggregated. Automated and simplified editorial and authoring process could significantly reduce time, labor, and costs. Therefore, there is a need for unified access to multilingual and multicultural news story material, beyond the level of a nation, ensuring context-aware, spatiotemporal, and semantic interpretation, correlating also and summarizing the interpreted material into a coherent gist. In this paper, we present a platform integrating multimodal analytics techniques, which are able to support journalists in handling large streams of real-time and diverse information. Specifically, the platform automatically crawls and indexes multilingual and multimedia information from heterogeneous resources. Textual information is automatically summarized and can be translated (on demand) into the language of the journalist. High-level information is extracted from both textual and multimedia content for fast inspection using concept clouds. The textual and multimedia content is semantically integrated and indexed using a common representation, to be accessible through a web-based search engine. The evaluation of the proposed platform was performed by several groups of journalists revealing satisfaction from the user side.

Deep Learning and Indian Heritage

Deep learning is becoming increasingly necessary as data, information and web and mobile interaction are proliferating with form, type and volume of data becoming easy to store, retrieve and process. This necessity is felt not only in science and engineering but also in social and commercial internet activity. The paper explores some ideas of deep learning to process large data in the context of content extraction in a heterogeneous web page containing multi-lingual information, in the Indian context. This basis is used to explore how Indian heritage over several thousands of years, is able to maintain information and knowledge in certain areas through oral, palm leaf and stone-cut data forms. The paper extends the proposed method to some heritage data and concludes how complex from computing point of view to extract the knowledge and essence of some texts like Bhagavad Gita.

Multilingual information for foreign residents in Japan: a survey of government initiatives

Abstract In Japan, translation of important information for foreign residents into community languages has occurred for many years mainly at the local government level rather than the national, largely because the national government has been slow to acknowledge Japan’s increasing diversity given the enduring national belief in ethnolinguistic homogeneity. In recent years, however, this has begun to change: although the bulk of the translation activity for foreign residents still occurs at grassroots level through the agency of local government and private organizations, the national government has begun to view such residents as seikatsusha ‘people making their lives in Japan’ rather than as visitors passing through. This article examines the provision of translated multilingual information to newcomer foreign residents in Japanese communities by both local and national government in order to examine this change.

Mobility, Empire and Cross-Cultural Contacts in Mongol Eurasia (MONGOL)

This essay reviews the ERC-funded project Mobility, Empire and Cross-Cultural Contacts in Mongol Eurasia conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1/2013-12/2017). The project has studied the impact of the Mongol Empire (1206-1368) on world history through the prism of mobility. It aimed to explain why, how, when, and to where people ideas and artifacts moved across Eurasia and what were the outcomes of these population movements. Guided by »the humanistic approach to world history«, namely combining a world history perspective with a close reading of multilingual primary sources, the project has created a sophisticated prosopographical database for studying these movements. The database records multilingual information about people who were active in Mongol Eurasia, currently indexing more than 13,500 persons. This unique resource enables the study of various groups of migrants (tribes, captives, experts, etc.); networks of economic and cultural transfer; and various imperial institutions (army, diplomacy, imperial sons-in-law), thereby illuminating the era’s social and cultural history. Stressing the pivotal role of the nomadic Mongols in initiating population movements, it analyses how these movements created multiple cross-cultural contacts; triggered massive ethnic, religious and geopolitical transformations, and led to a closer integration of the old world. The enhanced connectivity created both a common imperial culture – material, political, administrative – across Eurasia, and relativism of knowledge and religions. These, in turn, left a considerable imperial legacy to later polities, and helped shape the transition from the medieval to the early modern world. Yielding more than 80 publications so far, while various books, volumes and dissertations are in the making; training and grooming a considerable portion of the next generation of Mongol Empire scholars; and contributing significantly to the globalization of Mongolian studies worldwide, the project’s main legacy has been the study of the Mongol Empire on its own terms and within its full Eurasian context.

Metadata records machine translation combining multi‐engine outputs with limited parallel data

One way to facilitate Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) for digital libraries is to generate multilingual metadata records by applying Machine Translation (MT) techniques. Current online MT services are available and affordable, but are not always effective for creating multilingual metadata records. In this study, we implemented 3 different MT strategies and evaluated their performance when translating English metadata records to Chinese and Spanish. These strategies included combining MT results from 3 online MT systems (Google, Bing, and Yahoo!) with and without additional linguistic resources, such as manually‐generated parallel corpora, and metadata records in the two target languages obtained from international partners. The open‐source statistical MT platform Moses was applied to design and implement the three translation strategies. Human evaluation of the MT results using adequacy and fluency demonstrated that two of the strategies produced higher quality translations than individual online MT systems for both languages. Especially, adding small, manually‐generated parallel corpora of metadata records significantly improved translation performance. Our study suggested an effective and efficient MT approach for providing multilingual services for digital collections.

An empirical analysis of user behaviour on multilingual information retrieval

PurposeThis paper aims to understand user information behaviours when they perform multilingual information retrieval. It also offers reference for the development of multilingual information retrieval systems and relevant service platforms.Design/methodology/approachThe authors designed an experiment on multilingual information retrieval with WorldWideScience, utilized Camtasia studio7 (a screen capturing and recording tool) to record overall operational processes of subjects and collected participants’ thought processes with think-aloud protocols. Meanwhile, a questionnaire survey and interviews were used to examine the subjects’ background information, their feelings for the experiment and their ideas about the experimental platform, respectively. Thirty-two valid data points were obtained by 41 subjects.FindingsThe users preferred their own language for retrieval. Most users from social science chose general search or advanced search freely according to the tasks. The majority of the participants selected key words directly from the tasks as search terms. Doctoral candidates were more likely to construct a search query with logic symbols. Translation tools were utilized for assisting retrieval and solving doubts of translation. When facing obstacles, users stayed on the original web page to explore continually, followed by back to homepage.Originality/valueThis paper provides a study of user behaviour through investigating how users behave on the whole process of retrieving multilingual information. The findings offer advice for optimizing the function of multilingual information retrieval systems and service platforms.

Definition of requirements for accessing multilingual information opinions

In this paper, we will present a study concerning the understanding of the needs of people using Internet in order to access to multilingual information. In fact, in the framework of AMIS (Accessing Multilingual Information and opinionS), a Chist-Era project, we propose to develop a system which will help to understand the main idea of a video in a foreign language. In order to design a useful system, a survey allowing to specify the profile of potential users of AMIS has been conducted. The study concerned 170 people from different countries: Poland, Spain and France. The sample is composed of people of different ages and different culture and languages.The results, in terms of requirements, achieved from this study show differences depending on how often the people watch the news on TV or review them on the Internet, and on the age of the target group. These concrete results help us in several decisions concerning how to build a realistic architecture of AMIS.

Wikipédia como fonte de informação monolíngue e multilíngue sobre o patrimônio histórico da Espanha

Resumo Este trabalho analisa a enciclopédia online Wikipédia como uma ferramenta de difusão de informação monolingue e multilingue sobre patrimônio histórico da Espanha. A amostra é composta por bens imóveis de interesse cultural catalogados de várias províncias espanholas. Para o efeito, estudou-se em que medida estes bens estão representados na Wikipédia através de um artigo próprio, ou seja, com informação independente dedicada a cada um deles. Procedeu-se à realização de três diferentes tipos de pesquisa na enciclopédia (navegação, por meio de anexos e através do motor de busca interno) durante vários meses. Por outro lado, determinou-se o grau em que a Wikipédia inclui informação multilingue em relação à amostra, identificando o número e tipos de línguas nas quais se representa essa informação, bem como os artigos presentes noutras línguas diferentes do espanhol que são o resultado de uma tradução propriamente dita. Os resultados mostram que apenas 21,73% dos bens que constituem a amostra final possuem um artigo independente na Wikipédia, destes, somente 20,85% se encontram em várias línguas, sendo 50,00% traduções propriamente ditas. Isto leva-nos a concluir que, dada a natureza colaborativa desta ferramenta e dada também a importância cultural e econômica do patrimônio histórico, as próprias instituições deveriam responsabilizar-se em promover a difusão multilingue deste tipo de informação.

PubPsych: A Powerful Research Tool Providing Access to a Broad Supranational Body of Psychological Knowledge

In the scientific domain, millions of research papers in many different languages are published throughout the globe every year. This causes not only information overload, but because of the language barrier, researchers might not understand or even find articles that could be relevant for their work. Therefore, in the field of psychology, the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID) and its partners have created PubPsych ( https://www.pubpsych.eu/ ), an open access vertical search engine for psychological literature, tests, treatment programs and research data (metadata, not the content itself). We discuss the motivation for creating the system, design decisions, connected problems and our solutions, especially concerning multilingual information.

GEOINFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES IN THE PROMOTION OF TOURIST DESTINATIONS IN THE ZONE OF THE GREAT SILK ROAD

To date, travel portals represent the most promising tool for promoting tourist destinations. Compared to traditional print media, their main advantage is the ability to access a wealth of information, services, to make online reservations, to create package-tours, and to obtain interactive representation of tourist sites. The paper discusses tourism demand for destinations of the zone of the Great Silk Road applying key statistics of the Yandex search engine queries. A comparative analysis of tourist destinations portal data has been conducted based on the following criteria: availability of multilingual information, interactive maps, selfguided tour planners, and information about attractions, tours, and accommodation facilities. In order to attract a large number of tourists and to successfully implement the project “Silk Road,” it is necessary to establish a common trans-national tourism portal which would include information on tourism opportunities in all countries.