Multilingual access to web resources: an overview

Large, Andrew; Moukdad, Haidar

doi:10.1108/eum0000000006938

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Studies outside the United States such as in Australia (Applebee, Clayton, & Pascoe, 1997), Israel (Lazinger, Bar-Ilan, & Peritz, 1997), and Netherlands (Voorbij, 1999) focus on Internet use and activities rather than on Web searching behavior. In reviewing multilingual access issues and problems on the Web, Large and Moukdad (2001) pointed out that non-English speakers joined the Web faster than English speakers: the former had grown from 10% in 1995 to nearly 50% in 1999. They also noted that Web pages in languages other than English were growing faster than English-language pages.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Rieh

2005

Library & Information Science Research

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Rieh

2005

Library & Information Science Research

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“…Their counts, conducted in 1996, 1999, and 2000 using AltaVista indexes, suggest that Web English has grown 800 percent over four years, while German and Spanish have grown 1,500 percent and 1,800 percent, respectively. Large and Moukdad (2000) used another technique. They limited the retrieved results to one language only (an option given by AltaVista) and entered a meaningless string of characters preceded by a minus sign.…”

Section: Multiple Languages On the Web-an Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interface design and culture

Callahan

2005

Annual Review Info Sci & Tec

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IntroductionIt is common knowledge that computer interfaces in different cultures vary. Interface designers present information in different languages, use different iconography to designate concepts, and employ different standards for dates, time, and numbers. These manifest differences beg the question of how easily an interface designed in one country can be used in and transferred to another country. Are the challenges involved in adaptation merely cosmetic or are they shaped by more profound forces? Do all cultures respond to interfaces in similar ways, or does culture itself shape user comprehension? If culture is a factor in explaining varied user reactions to comparable interfaces, what specific cultural dimensions are responsible for the divergences? Do differences reside mainly at the level of national cultures, or do they depend on other vanables such as class, gender, age, education, and expertise with technology? In the face of a potentially large number of explanatory variables, how do we delimit a workable concept of culture and yet remain cognizant of other factors that might shape the results of culture and interface research?Questions such as these have been asked in the ergonomics community since the early 1970s, when the industrialization of developing countries created a need for more research on cultural differences (Honold, 1999), resulting in an increased interest in the universal applicability of ergonomic principles. This trend continued after the reunification of Germany and the emergence of market economies in Eastern Europe (Nielsen, 1990). In the mid-l990s, as markets outside the U.S. rapidly expanded, it became necessary to develop appropriate user interfaces for non-Western cultures in order to facilitate international cooperation. This fresh impetus for research led to the development of practical guidelines and a body of case studies and examples of possible solutions. Most recently we have seen attempts to provide a theoretical foundation for cross-cultural usability engineering and experimental comparison studies (Honold, 1999).The literature on international issues in human-computer interaction consists of three major types: 1) design guidelines, pointing out 258 Annual Review of Information Science and Technology issues of which designers should be aware when creating an interface for use in a foreign country, 2) theoretical works on cultural differences, which attempt to evaluate how cultural models from other fields can be applied to interface design, and 3) empirical research, dealing with various aspects of interface design in selected countries.Design guidelines are the largest group and concentrate on culturally acceptable screen elements such as date and time formats, text flow, collating sequences, and numeric formats. These elements, if not used appropriately, may impair understanding of the interface features and functions. But design guidelines do not provide much understanding of how users from different cultures interact with computers, or any similarities and di...

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“…Despite the dominance of the English language in electronic information resources (Large and Moukdad 2000), a growing amount of electronic information is being generated in other languages. The global outreach of the World Wide Web in particular has accelerated this process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Retrieval from Full-Text Arabic Databases: Can Search Engines Designed for English Do the Job?

Moukdad¹,

Large²

2001

Libri

Self Cite

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The amount of electronic information in Arabic and other non-English languages available, especially on the World Wide Web, is increasing. Searches for such information can be undertaken on engines developed with the English language in mind, but will these engines work as effectively in other languages? This article investigates the impact on retrieval of prefixes in Arabic, which are far more common than in English. Typically search engines such as AltaVista designed implicitly for English include right hand (suffix) but not left hand (prefix) truncation. A test collection of 271Arabic HTML records was created and indexed using the personal version of AltaVista. A series of searches was conducted on this collection, again using AltaVista. The results showed that searches on nouns stripped of prefixes reduced recall, in some cases dramatically, and that total recall of nouns can only be guaranteed by repeating searches that include the various prefixed versions of the nouns. The research questions the assumption that search engines designed with English in mind will work as well with different language structures.

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Multilingual access to web resources: an overview

Cited by 14 publications

References 4 publications

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

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

Interface design and culture

Information Retrieval from Full-Text Arabic Databases: Can Search Engines Designed for English Do the Job?

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