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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to discuss the results of a customer knowledge study commissioned by the Parliamentary Documentation Centre (PDC) of the European Parliament in order to elicit a better understanding of the views and needs of its actual and potential client base. Design/methodology/approach -The study consisted of in-depth, face-to-face interviews with 72 clients and 11 staff (83 individuals) in Brussels in February 2004. The paper explores the significance of information in the parliamentary context and summarises the activities which respondents described as being information-dependent. The paper also highlights the evolutionary nature of information need during the course of the legislative process. Findings -The information-seeking behaviour and skills of the PDC clients are discussed, as are the criteria by which they assess information quality. The study revealed that users were frequently uncritical and pragmatic in use of the most readily available information, sacrificing quality in favour of ease of access. Originality/value -This paper presents results from a uniquely complex information environment -the European Union. Users tended to be complacent about their information-seeking skills and reluctant to engage in skills enhancement activities.

A right ideal (left ideal, two-sided ideal) is a non-empty language $L$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ such that $L=L\Sigma^*$ ($L=\Sigma^*L$, $L=\Sigma^*L\Sigma^*$). Let $k=3$ for right ideals, 4 for left ideals and 5 for two-sided ideals. We show that there exist sequences ($L_n \mid n \ge k $) of right, left, and two-sided regular ideals, where $L_n$ has quotient complexity (state complexity) $n$, such that $L_n$ is most complex in its class under the following measures of complexity: the size of the syntactic semigroup, the quotient complexities of the left quotients of $L_n$, the number of atoms (intersections of complemented and uncomplemented left quotients), the quotient complexities of the atoms, and the quotient complexities of reversal, star, product (concatenation), and all binary boolean operations. In that sense, these ideals are "most complex" languages in their classes, or "universal witnesses" to the complexity of the various operations. Comment: 25 pages, 11 figures. To appear in Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1311.4448

A (left) quotient of a language L by a word w is the language w −1 L = {x | wx ∈ L}. The quotient complexity of a regular language L is the number of quotients of L; it is equal to the state complexity of L, which is the number of states in a minimal deterministic finite automaton accepting L. An atom of L is an equivalence class of the relation in which two words are equivalent if for each quotient, they either are both in the quotient or both not in it; hence it is a non-empty intersection of complemented and uncomplemented quotients of L. A right (respectively, left and two-sided) ideal is a language L over an alphabet Σ that satisfies L = LΣ * (respectively, L = Σ * L and L = Σ * LΣ * ). We compute the maximal number of atoms and the maximal quotient complexities of atoms of right, left and two-sided regular ideals.

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This paper reports the results of case studies of Scottish food and drink exporters which sought to explore the use of customer language in marketing and exporting products to France. The findings provide evidence for three levels of language orientation, illustrating differing attitudes to the impact of customer language use, despite consensus that such is good practice and "courteous" in responding to customers. Given the diverse import community, language is more influential in certain contexts and at certain points in the marketing process. Changes in the exporter/importer dynamic may indicate greater need for customer language skills amongst exporters, but this was regarded with mixed feelings by the case study companies. Trends such as the increased demand for product information and the growing reliance on electronic communication had an impact on language of communication, in particular with the shift to processed products. A number of paradigms of Internet usage are identified, with the more proactive companies employing a multi-level, multilingual approach.

In the 21st century, multilingual tools are gaining importance as increasingly diverse user groups from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds seek access to equally diverse pieces of information. The authors of this paper believe that most current forms of multilingual information access are inadequate for this role, and that a new form of multilingual thesaurus is required. The core of this paper introduces their pilot thesaurus InfoDEFT as a possible model for new online thesauri, which are semantically structured, encyclopedic and multilingual. The authors conclude that while the manual construction of such thesauri is labour intensive and hence costly, pilot thesauri can be used as training sets for artificial learning programmes, thus increasing their volume considerably at relatively little extra cost.

The state complexity of the result of a regular operation is often positively correlated with the number of distinct transformations induced by letters in the minimal deterministic finite automaton of the input languages. That is, more transformations in the inputs means higher state complexity in the output. When this correlation holds, the state complexity of a unary operation can be maximized using languages in which there is one letter corresponding to each possible transformation; for operations of higher arity, we can use m-tuples of languages in which there is one letter corresponding to each possible m-tuple of transformations. In this way, a small set of languages can be used as witnesses for many common regular operations, eliminating the need to search for witnesses -though at the expense of using very large alphabets. We formalize this approach and examine its limitations. We define a class of "uniform" operations for which this approach works; the class is closed under composition and includes common operations such as star, concatenation, reversal, union, and complement. Our main result is that the worst-case state complexity of a uniform operation can be determined by considering a finite set of witnesses, and this set depends only on the arity of the operation and the state complexities of the inputs.