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Interaction and User Interfaces

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Multilingual Information Retrieval

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Abstract

Increasingly people are required to interact or communicate with Information Retrieval (IR) applications in order to find useful information. This interaction commonly takes place through the user interface, which should help users to formulate their queries, refine their searches and understand and examine search results. In multilingual information access, the design of an effective search interface and the provision of functionality to assist the user with searching are vital as users cross the language boundary and interact with materials written in foreign, and potentially unknown, languages. Designing the user interface may also involve the localisation of existing material and services, in addition to providing cross-language search functionalities. This chapter focuses on the users of MLIR/CLIR systems and highlights the issues involved in developing user interfaces, including what form of multilingual search assistance can help users and how to design an interface to support multilingual information access.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is exemplified, for example, by Ingwersen’s cognitive perspective on IR (Ingwersen 1996).

  2. 2.

    Information seeking is also itself a part of the wider field of human information behaviour: “the totality of human behaviour in relation to sources and channels of information, including both active and passive information seeking, and information use” (Wilson 2000, p. 49).

  3. 3.

    Note that for some tasks users may be unable to easily formalise their information needs as they may not start out with a specific goal or purpose (e.g., in the case of information exploration or serendipitous information seeking behaviours). Assisting users with articulating their information needs is one of the goals of an IR application.

  4. 4.

    Often relevance is considered as whether a document is on the same topic as the user’s query, however there are many other, more subjective elements to relevance that determine whether a user considers a result to be relevant or not (see, e.g., Barry and Schamber 1998, Steinerová 2008).

  5. 5.

    The notion of an information need highlights that a gap in knowledge exists between what someone knows and what they need to know to fulfil some kind of underlying goal, problem or work task. Taylor (1968) describes how information needs arise using a series of four stages: from the unexpressed (visceral) need – a conscious (or even unconscious) need for information, through to a conscious need – an ambiguous and rambling statement, to a more qualified and rational statement (formalised need), to a compromised need – the question expressed in a language understandable by the search system, e.g., as queries.

  6. 6.

    A helpful analogy to highlight the diversity of subject search tasks is that of finding a needle in a haystack (Koll 2000). In this analogy the document(s) or information to be found are needles and the IR system or database(s) used are the haystacks. The point is that subject searching is like finding a needle in a haystack, but not all searches are the same.

  7. 7.

    A requirement is “a statement about an intended product that specifies what it should do or how it should perform” (Preece et al. 2002, p. 204).

  8. 8.

    http://www.multimatch.org/

  9. 9.

    The notion of ‘situation’ describes a specific search scenario: a particular person carrying out a specific task in a given context at a particular time.

  10. 10.

    Ogden and Davis (2000) summarise two types of users for CLIR: bilingual users who formulate their queries in their native language to retrieve documents in their second languages and monolingual users who are interested in finding information in other languages.

  11. 11.

    http://translate.google.com/translate_s

  12. 12.

    Tim Berners-Lee, who coined the term ‘Semantic Web’ in 2001, defines it as “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines” (Berners-Lee et al. 2001).

  13. 13.

    Although less common in general web searching command-line syntax is still widely used in interfaces to professional indexes and databases, such as those in the medical, scientific or legal domains.

  14. 14.

    http://translate.google.com/

  15. 15.

    This cross-language search functionality is different from Google Translate and is available as a part of the main web search interface. Google Translate, on the other hand, is a stand-alone translation service that can be used for various purposes, such as translating a given URL or a piece of text, but also allows users to perform a web search starting from Google Translate.

  16. 16.

    If French was selected as the interface language the phrase ‘Showing results for’ is changed to the equivalent ‘Résultats pour’.

  17. 17.

    An ontology is an explicit or formal specification of concepts/terms in a particular domain and the relationships between them. The concepts can be arranged in any manner; a taxonomy, on the other hand, is a more restrictive form of ontology that requires that the concepts are arranged in a hierarchy.

  18. 18.

    http://born.nii.ac.jp/

  19. 19.

    http://babelfish.yahoo.com/

  20. 20.

    This relates to the ease of use with which functionality can be accessed, i.e., the ease of use in which a user communicates with a system. Usability depends on characteristics of the user and characteristics of their tasks (or human processes). That is, if the functionality provided is easy to use, but does not address the task at hand, then the system is not successful. Jakob Nielsen’s website (http://www.useit.com/) is a useful source of information providing links to resources on many different aspects of usability. A further helpful website that references and implements many proposed usability assessment schemes is Gary Perlman’s ‘User Interface Usability Evaluation with Web-Based Questionnaires’: http://hcibib.org/perlman/question.html

  21. 21.

    The process of determining requirements is to gather or capture what a system should do (not how) by: identifying users’ needs; generating a set of stable requirements. The first step aims to understand as much as possible about the users, their work, and the context of their work so that the system being built will meet their goals. The second step aims to produce from the needs identified a set of requirements which provides a foundation from which to continue with the design stage. Requirements may include functional and non-functional requirements.

  22. 22.

    A use case is also focused on user goals, but with an emphasis on user-system interaction rather than the task itself. A use case is a “case of using the (prospective) system” (used to specify user’s functional requirements) and a scenario specifies a flow of events. These can be written in natural language or expressed in graphical form. The results can be fed into the design of the application and inform the specification of system requirements to ensure the provision of functionality to support the users’ search tasks and information needs.

  23. 23.

    Characters include letters, ideographs, digits, punctuation marks, diacritic marks and mathematical symbols.

  24. 24.

    See http://www.multilingual.com/articleDetail.php?id=594 for further details on reusing text in multilingual user interfaces.

  25. 25.

    A cookie is a piece of text stored on a user's computer by their web browser. A cookie can be used for authentication, storing site preferences or tracking users through a session, e.g., paying for goods from an online shop. The cookie can be used to add persistence to a web application.

  26. 26.

    This is the functionality provided as of January 2011. Note that Google is given as a case study not because it is the only (or best) way of doing things, but because it exhibits many of the ideas discussed in this chapter.

  27. 27.

    This is also available for free at http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/

  28. 28.

    http://nlp.uned.es/iCLEF/

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione, Via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124, Pisa, Italy

    Carol Peters

  2. Institute of Applied Information Technology, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Steinberggasse 13, 8401, Winterthur, Switzerland

    Martin Braschler

  3. Information School, University of Sheffield, 211 Portobello Street Regent Court, Sheffield, S1 4DP, UK

    Paul Clough

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Peters, C., Braschler, M., Clough, P. (2012). Interaction and User Interfaces. In: Multilingual Information Retrieval. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23008-0_4

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