Multilingual Web Research Articles

HeMT: A multilingual system for human evaluation of metadata records machine translation

We demonstrate HeMT, a multilingual Web system for human evaluation of machine translated metadata records. It allows human evaluators to examine and assess machine translation results for sample metadata records in Chinese, English, and Spanish. This paper describes the design principles, users, and the functions of the system. It also presents the research design of a small-scale usability testing that will not only examine the appearance of the Website, but also the accuracy of the content and the Website’s cultural appropriateness.

Enterprise web services-enabled translation framework

Managing multilingual documents is a time consuming, error prone and expensive task, particularly when dealing with dynamic documents such as web contents. A broad spectrum of organizations such as corporations, NGO's and Governments are committed to offer such documents in a number of languages where the content is further localized to suit specific cultural settings. In this paper, we propose a business model supported by a web services-enabled framework, which facilitate all aspects related to multilingual web contents management, from negotiating translation-request quotations through production of final localized output as well as its verification, and delivery. This service is based on a collaborative internet-based translation framework, referred to in this paper as Translation Management System (TMS). Our approach uses XLIFF, a Web service standard developed by OASIS, in order to interoperate enterprise translation services and related Web applications. We present and implement a translation business model centered around standardized processes, which we validate through a case study in the context of a Web translation project. We also propose a QoS monitoring model to satisfy the quality-related requirements of a translation job. Finally, we evaluate the usability of our streamlined Web translation services through users' perception in terms of flexibility, ease of use, and quality of translation. The results revealed interesting performance tradeoffs relative to translation workflows and content-translation accuracy as well as flexibility, and diversity of TMS provided services.

Using a new relational concept to improve the clustering performance of search engines

In this paper, we present a novel clustering algorithm to generate a number of candidate clusters from other web search results. The candidate clusters generate a connective relation among the clusters and the relation is semantic. Moreover, the algorithm also contains the following attractive properties: (1) it can be applied to multilingual web documents, (2) it improves the clustering performance of any search engine, (3) its unsupervised learning can automatically identify potentially relevant knowledge without using any corpus, and (4) clustering results are generated on the fly and fitted into search engines.

Multilingual document mining and navigation using self-organizing maps

One major approach for information finding in the WWW is to navigate through some Web directories and browse them until the goal pages were found. However, such directories are generally constructed manually and may have disadvantages of narrow coverage and inconsistency. Besides, most of existing directories provide only monolingual hierarchies that organized Web pages in terms that a user may not be familiar with. In this work, we will propose an approach that could automatically arrange multilingual Web pages into a multilingual Web directory to break the language barriers in Web navigation. In this approach, a self-organizing map is constructed to train each set of monolingual Web pages and obtain two feature maps, which reveal the relationships among Web pages and thematic keywords, respectively, for such language. We then apply a hierarchy generation process on these maps to obtain the monolingual hierarchy for these Web pages. A hierarchy alignment method is then applied on these monolingual hierarchies to discover the associations between nodes in different hierarchies. Finally, a multilingual Web directory is constructed according to such associations. We applied the proposed approach on a set of Web pages and obtained interesting result that demonstrates the feasibility of our method in multilingual Web navigation.

Hot topics in youth education outreach.

This presentation will focus on ways in which professional societies and their volunteers can make a lasting, positive difference in supporting the science and math learning of young students. The introduction will provide a brief overview of trends in student achievement in math and science and will discuss the availability of qualified teachers in the United States. Four features of effective learning environments will be described. The remainder of the presentation will be devoted to examples of how scientific communities can become directly involved in reaching out to students on a local and global scale. A variety of youth programs hosted by the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the OSA Foundation will be highlighted with an emphasis on the scope, goals, and quantitative results of each initiative. From a multilingual Web site that provides students, teachers, and parents with basic science information, lesson plans, and hands‐on activities, to the production and worldwide distribution of “optics suitcases” that give students the opportunity to participate in hands‐on demonstrations, OSA's recent efforts have benefited thousands of individuals in more than 20 countries. The planned collaboration between ASA and OSA to develop acoustics‐focused classroom materials, a Web site, and demonstration kit will be described.

A machine learning approach to sentiment analysis in multilingual Web texts

Sentiment analysis, also called opinion mining, is a form of information extraction from text of growing research and commercial interest. In this paper we present our machine learning experiments with regard to sentiment analysis in blog, review and forum texts found on the World Wide Web and written in English, Dutch and French. We train from a set of example sentences or statements that are manually annotated as positive, negative or neutral with regard to a certain entity. We are interested in the feelings that people express with regard to certain consumption products. We learn and evaluate several classification models that can be configured in a cascaded pipeline. We have to deal with several problems, being the noisy character of the input texts, the attribution of the sentiment to a particular entity and the small size of the training set. We succeed to identify positive, negative and neutral feelings to the entity under consideration with ca. 83% accuracy for English texts based on unigram features augmented with linguistic features. The accuracy results of processing the Dutch and French texts are ca. 70 and 68% respectively due to the larger variety of the linguistic expressions that more often diverge from standard language, thus demanding more training patterns. In addition, our experiments give us insights into the portability of the learned models across domains and languages. A substantial part of the article investigates the role of active learning techniques for reducing the number of examples to be manually annotated.

Volunteer Endeavors to Promote ICT in a Developing Country: the case of the Pakistan Library Automation Group

This paper is a case study of the Pakistan Library Automation Group, formed in October 2000 by volunteers in library and information science and computer science in Pakistan. The group's mission was to promote the use of ICT in Pakistani libraries with virtually no financial support. The achievements of the group during 6 years include: PakLAG Website; Automation of libraries with Library Information Management System (LIMS); Multilingual Web OPAC; Searching interface of National Digital Library; Online directory of LIS professionals; Publications program; Pak-LIS News; E-mail discussion group; Online posting of job advertisements; Virtual library; Training in ICTs for library professionals; and free consultancy service in library automation. The group's future plans are also presented. The study concludes that, if some committed professionals present themselves for voluntary endeavors and plan to develop their nation without any material resources, they can play a significant role in the promotion of ICT in the libraries of a developing country.

Combining probability models and web mining models: a framework for proper name transliteration

The rapid growth of the Internet has created a tremendous number of multilingual resources. However, language boundaries prevent information sharing and discovery across countries. Proper names play an important role in search queries and knowledge discovery. When foreign names are involved, proper names are often translated phonetically which is referred to as transliteration. In this research we propose a generic transliteration framework, which incorporates an enhanced Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and a Web mining model. We improved the traditional statistical-based transliteration in three areas: (1) incorporated a simple phonetic transliteration knowledge base; (2) incorporated a bigram and a trigram HMM; (3) incorporated a Web mining model that uses word frequency of occurrence information from the Web. We evaluated the framework on an English---Arabic back transliteration. Experiments showed that when using HMM alone, a combination of the bigram and trigram HMM approach performed the best for English---Arabic transliteration. While the bigram model alone achieved fairly good performance, the trigram model alone did not. The Web mining approach boosted the performance by 79.05%. Overall, our framework achieved a precision of 0.72 when the eight best transliterations were considered. Our results show promise for using transliteration techniques to improve multilingual Web retrieval.

Consumer Health Information Diversity Project

Objectives - The Consumer Health Information Diversity Project is developing principles and protocols for the translation of multilingual resources and the implementation of strategies to engage the Chinese and South Asian commu- nities so that the resources gathered or produced will meet their needs. Current multilingual Web sites will be evaluated, and the hospital's consumer health Web site will be enhanced, increasing navigability and accessibility. Methods - The health information needs of consumers are determined through focus groups. Once confirmed, a variety of strategies are used in response. Results - Activities are ongoing. Hard copy and PDF resources have been identified and navigability and accessibility have been addressed. Training is required to make these materials more available to the communities of interest. Discussion - Although not completed, a number of strategies have been initiated jointly by two hospital depart- ments. It is hoped that encouraging community involvement in all phases of the project will increase its sustainability.

Using Web resources to construct multilingual medical thesaurus for cross-language medical information retrieval

Due to the language barrier, non-English users are unable to retrieve the most updated medical information from the U.S. authoritative medical websites, such as PubMed and MedlinePlus. However, currently, there is no any cross-language medical information retrieval (CLMIR) system that can help Chinese-speaking consumers cross the language barrier in finding useful English medical information. A few CLMIR systems utilize MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) to help overcome the language barrier. Unfortunately, the traditional Chinese version of MeSH is currently unavailable. In this paper, we employ a semi-automatic term translation method to construct a Chinese–English MeSH by exploiting abundant multilingual Web resources, including Web anchor texts and search–result pages. Through this method, we have developed a Chinese–English Mesh Compilation System to assist knowledge engineers in compiling a Chinese–English medical thesaurus with more than 19,000 entries. Furthermore, this thesaurus has been used to develop a prototypical system for cross-language medical information retrieval, MMODE, which can help consumers retrieve top-quality English medical information using Chinese terms.

Developing Web Databases for Aboriginal Language Preservation

This article discusses the development of integrated multilingual Web databases to help the preservation of the Native American language East Cree. The creation of digital online resources for threatened aboriginal languages presents many technical, educational and ethical challenges. We focus here on the technical challenges in order to discuss both the problems encountered in this particular context, and the solutions we have considered and explored. We illustrate our discussion with examples from an Oral Stories Database we developed in collaboration with Cree education consultants and speakers in 2002-04. We advocate an approach that includes fast-prototyping, open-source development, and design for the database engine that balances speed, availability, features, and resources. We discuss the impact the combination of this technical approach and the participatory action research method is having on language maintenance.

Automatic support for the alignment of multilingual Web sites

Multilingual Web sites are expected to provide the same content expressed in various languages, presented according to a common style, with the same interaction facilities. To this extent, most Web developers start from a source language version of the site and produce the multilingual versions by providing translations in all supported languages. Translation pages are usually generated by replicating the HTML structure and the scripting language sections of the original pages and by translating the textual sections into the target languages. This practice exposes the site to several problems during its evolution. Updates may be not properly propagated to all translations, and unwanted divergences can be introduced over time in content, presentation and interaction. In this paper, we propose a prototype toolkit, limited to Western languages, that can help restructuring an existing static Web site, and migrating its multilingual content to a unified and consistent representation. First of all, pages are classified according to the language of their content. Then, correspondences among pages in the original language and their translations are determined. Based on the computation of the edit operations necessary to make each page consistent with its translations, the site is updated to a new version where all pages are aligned. In the last phase, a unified representation of the structure and of the multilingual content of each page is inserted into a Content Management System. This ensures a consistent future evolution of the site. The prototype toolkit has been tested on 10 existing static Web sites, with texts in Italian, English, German and Spanish. For some of the above-mentioned phases, alternative solutions have been considered and their relative advantages have been evaluated against a manually constructed gold standard. We are quite confident that with some adaptation, most of the results we obtained can be extended to any pair of Western languages. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Multilingual Web retrieval: An experiment in English–Chinese business intelligence

As increasing numbers of non-English resources have become available on the Web, the interesting and important issue of how Web users can retrieve documents in different languages has arisen. Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), the study of retrieving information in one language by queries expressed in another language, is a promising approach to the problem. Cross-language information retrieval has attracted much attention in recent years. Most research systems have achieved satisfactory performance on standard Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) collections such as news articles, but CLIR techniques have not been widely studied and evaluated for applications such as Web portals. In this article, the authors present their research in developing and evaluating a multilingual English–Chinese Web portal that incorporates various CLIR techniques for use in the business domain. A dictionary-based approach was adopted and combines phrasal translation, co-occurrence analysis, and pre- and posttranslation query expansion. The portal was evaluated by domain experts, using a set of queries in both English and Chinese. The experimental results showed that co-occurrence-based phrasal translation achieved a 74.6% improvement in precision over simple word-by-word translation. When used together, pre- and posttranslation query expansion improved the performance slightly, achieving a 78.0% improvement over the baseline word-by-word translation approach. In general, applying CLIR techniques in Web applications shows promise.

Web searching across languages: Preference and behavior of bilingual academic users in Korea

The problem of language in Web searching has been discussed primarily in the area of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). However, much CLIR research centers on investigation of the effectiveness of automatic translation techniques. The case study reported here explored bilingual user behaviors, perceptions, and preferences with respect to the capability of the Web as a multilingual information resource. Twenty-eight bilingual academic users from Myongji University in Korea were recruited for the study. Findings show that the subjects did not use Web search engines as multilingual tools. For search queries, they selected a language that represents their information need most accurately depending on the types of information task rather than choosing their first language. Subjects expressed concerns about the accuracy of machine translation of scholarly terminologies and preferred to have user control over multilingual Web searches.

Toward Web mining of cross-language query translations in digital libraries

This paper proposes an effective query-translation approach that enables a cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) service to be more easily supported in digital library systems that only contain monolingual content. A query-translation engine called LiveTrans is used to process the translation requests of cross-lingual queries from connected digital library systems. To automatically extract translations not covered by standard dictionaries, the engine is developed based on a novel integration of dictionary resources and Web mining approaches, including anchor-text and search-result methods. The engine exploits a broad range of multilingual Web resources used as live bilingual corpora to alleviate translation difficulties. It is shown to be particularly effective for extracting multilingual translation equivalents of query terms containing proper names or new terminology. The obtained results show the feasibility of and great potential for creating English-Chinese CLIR services in existing digital libraries and new applications in cross-language Web searching, although difficulties still remain that need to be investigated further.

Personalized Web views for multilingual Web sources

When browsing information on large Web sites, users often receive too much irrelevant information. The WWW information collection, collaging, and programming (Wiccap) system lets ordinary users build personalized Web views, which let them see only the information they want - and in the way they prefer. It provides a set of GUI tools, including a mapping wizard, extraction agent, and presentation toolkit, that hide the internal representation from ordinary users, but let experienced users create more advanced mapping rules. Wiccap encapsulates HTML and language-specific details from the original Web site, facilitating the creation of personalized Web views for multilingual sites.

The CERES S'COOL Project

In recent years, an education plan has been a required part of most proposals for new scientific research funding from NASA. Likewise, the National Science Foundation considers “integration of research and education” as one of its principal strategies. As a result, many scientists are seeking effective ways to incorporate education into their work. This article shares important lessons learned by one group of scientists embarking on outreach efforts. Experience with the Students' Cloud Observations On-line (S'COOL) Project, the educational outreach portion of the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) investigation, yields lessons that may help other scientists to develop useful outreach efforts. CERES scientists developed S'COOL over a 15-month period, with direct involvement and feedback from teachers. S'COOL has continued to evolve, thanks to ongoing feedback from participants. As a result, the project has been quite successful, currently involving over 1400 registered participants in 61 countries around the world. Student reports of cloud conditions help scientists verify their cloud property retrieval algorithms and allow students to obtain and analyze real scientific data. A number of educational materials, including an extensive multilingual Web site, have been developed to help teachers and students understand the research questions and the challenges of working with global remote-sensing datasets.

The role of cultural context in multilingual website usability

This paper draws evidence from the anthropological, worldviews and systems design literature, to show how culture and context play a significant role in the way people perceive and approach their interaction with a multilingual e-commerce website. In doing so, this paper shows that a relationship exists between language, cultural context and usability. The paper initially takes a look at the problems raised by the translation of text from one language to another and then moves onto an overview of the current practice of presenting multilingual web sites on the web. Next, the role of culture, through one’s internal lens is examined. The impact this has on human computer interaction is then explored. Finally, a model is proposed that that aims to guide further research into the role of cultural context in the usability of multilingual websites. Some suggestions for further research are provided.

The New Babel: Langauge Barriers on the World Wide Web

The relative role of various languages as carriers of web-based in forrnation is assessed and the trends examined. Although English is the dominant language，its relative posìtion vis-a-vis other languages is declining as the Web attracts more inforrnation from other language communities. The proportion of web users from the English-speaking world is also higher than from any other language group，but their relative sσength is declining and already they account for less than half of all web users. In this situation of growing language diversity，the language barrier is becoming stronger. Various solutions to this barrier are reviewed : multilingual web sites，multilingual approaches by web portals, Although all these approaches can offer partial remedies ，none currently provide a complete answer. Finally，the role that conslructed languages can play is assessed.

Cedefop upgrades its multilingual Web site

Cedefop upgrades its multilingual Web site