Multilinguality in the digital library: A review

an article by Anne R. Diekema (Utah State University, Logan, USA) published in The Electronic Library Volume 30 Issue 2 (2012)

Abstract

Purpose
Together, increasing globalization and the internet created fertile grounds for the establishment of multilingual digital libraries. Providing cross-lingual access to materials is of particular interest to political entities such as the European Union, which currently has 23 official languages, but also to multinational companies and countries that have different languages represented among their citizens. The main objective of this paper is to review the literature on multilingual digital libraries and provide an overview of this area.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a thorough literature search in four different databases, a core set of literature on multilingual digital libraries was retrieved. Literature on various aspects of this topic was reviewed. The paper is organized based on emerging themes directly drawn from the literature. Where warranted additional literature is brought in to provide necessary background information or clarification.
Findings
Creating a multilingual digital library is a highly complex undertaking and typically requires a collaborative effort between different organizations and people with different areas of expertise. Enabling users to search across languages requires translation resources to cross the language barrier, which can be challenging depending on the language and resource availability. Additional challenges were found to be in data management (localization and language processing), representation (dealing with different fonts and character codes), development (creating international software, cross-cultural collaboration), and interoperability (system architecture and data sharing). Research in multilingual digital libraries was mostly system based involving experimental systems or system prototypes.
Research limitations/implications
Most likely the literature review does not include all possible journal articles on multilingual digital libraries even though the literature searches done to obtain these articles were thorough and deliberate. Journal articles without the descriptors used in this search and those articles not indexed in the four different databases used in the search will not be included here. The review excludes cross-language information retrieval research unless it is directly related to existing multilingual digital libraries, or a connection to digital libraries in general is made in the paper itself.
Originality/value
This paper provides the first literature review on the topic of multilingual digital libraries and provides a concise overview of relevant aspects in this area. The number of multilingual digital libraries is growing, as is the interest from the research community in these libraries to apply their research findings from cross-language information retrieval. This review article provides a valuable entry point to the field of multilingual digital libraries for researchers, practitioners, and other interested parties.

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Updating broken web links: An automatic recommendation system

an article by Juan Martinez-Romo and Lourdes Araujo (Dpto. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, NLP & IR Group, UNED, Madrid) published in Information Processing & Management Volume 48 Issue 2 (March 2012)

Abstract

Broken hypertext links are a frequent problem in the Web.
Sometimes the page which a link points to has disappeared forever, but in many other cases the page has simply been moved to another location in the same web site or to another one. In some cases the page besides being moved, is updated, becoming a bit different to the original one but rather similar.
In all these cases it can be very useful to have a tool that provides us with pages highly related to the broken link, since we could select the most appropriate one. The relationship between the broken link and its possible linkable pages, can be defined as a function of many factors.

In this work we have employed several resources both in the context of the link and in the Web to look for pages related to a broken link. From the resources in the context of a link, we have analyzed several sources of information such as the anchor text, the text surrounding the anchor, the URL and the page containing the link.

We have also extracted information about a link from the Web infrastructure such as search engines, Internet archives and social tagging systems.

We have combined all of these resources to design a system that recommends pages that can be used to recover the broken link.

A novel methodology is presented to evaluate the system without resorting to user judgments, thus increasing the objectivity of the results, and helping to adjust the parameters of the algorithm. We have also compiled a web page collection with true broken links, which has been used to test the full system by humans.

Results show that the system is able to recommend the correct page among the first ten results when the page has been moved, and to recommend highly related pages when the original one has disappeared.

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A survey on information re-finding techniques

an article by Tangjian Deng and Ling Feng (Tsinghua University, Beijing) published in International Journal of Web Information Systems Volume 7 Issue 4 (2011)

Abstract

Purpose
Observing that people re-access what they have seen or used in the past is very common in real lives. The purpose of this paper is to review the subject of information re-finding comprehensively, and introduce to readers the underlying techniques and mechanisms used in information re-finding.
Design/methodology/approach
After analysing users’ information re-finding behaviours and their requirements, the paper studies the natural way of re-finding in human memory, and reviews state-of-the-art techniques and tools developed in the fields of web and personal information management for information re-finding.
Findings
Four main re-finding support techniques on the Web are:

• re-finding tools in Web browsers; 
• history service; 
• re-finding search engine; and 
• voice-based re-finding.

Three main re-finding approaches are used in PIM: browse-based approaches; content-based search; and context-based search.
Practical implications
Following the recalling mechanisms in human memory, the method of recall-by-context in both fields of web usage and personal information management can make users feel easy to re-find information.
Originality/value
The paper gives a comprehensive overview of information re-finding techniques.

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