Search

Internet search engines allow access to online information from all over the world. However, there is currently a general assumption that users are fluent in the languages of all documents that they might search for. This has for historical reasons usually been a choice between English and the locally supported language. Given the rapidly growing size of the Internet, it is likely that future users will need to access information in languages in which they are not fluent or have no knowledge of at all. This paper shows how information retrieval and machine translation can be combined in a cross-language information access framework to help overcome the language barrier. We present encouraging preliminary experimental results using English queries to retrieve documents from the standard Japanese language BMIR-J2 retrieval test collection. We outline the scope and purpose of cross-language information access and provide an example application to suggest that technology already exists to provide effective and potentially useful applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between August 2000 and August 2002, the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia distributed over seven million freely-available electronic books to users from more than 100 different countries. Delivered in a variety of formats, including .lit and .pdb, these ebooks have provided proof-of-concept for the adaptive uses of TEI standards beyond the World Wide Web – standards that the Electronic Text Center has employed since its inception in 1992. The first half of this paper discusses the mechanics of ebook production at the Etext Center, the limits of the current technology, and the conversion workflow we hope to implement in the future. The second half discusses user response to our ebook collection, classroom applications of ebook technology, and the advantages and disadvantages that different formats offer to scholars and instructors in the humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is important to give useful clues for selecting desired content from a number of retrieval results obtained (usually) from a vague search request. Compared with monolingual retrieval, such a support framework is inevitable and much more significant for filtering given translingual retrieval results. This paper describes an attempt to provide appropriate translation of major keywords in each document in a cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) result, as a browsing support for users. Our idea of determining appropriate translation of major keywords is based on word co-occurrence distribution in the translation target language, considering the actual situation of WWW content where it is difficult to obtain aligned parallel (multilingual) corpora. The proposed method provides higher quality of keyword translation to yield a more effective support in identifying the target documents in the retrieval result. We report the advantage of this browsing support technique through evaluation experiments including comparison with conditions of referring to a translated document summary, and discuss related issues to be examined towards more effective cross-language information extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explains that this issue grew out of a workshop held in conjunction with a conference in Montreal, Canada in August 1998. Goal of the workshop to open the dialogue which explores current capabilities and requirements for developing multi-lingual information management and access; Focus of the papers on the potential to couple machine translation with established techniques for monolingual information retrieval.

The article presents information on the periodical "Computers and the Humanities" that was established in 1966 to report on significant new research concerning the application of computer methods to humanities scholarship. Regular issues, special sections and special issues are devoted to reporting relevant computer-assisted work in a broad range of fields, including all the traditional humanities and arts disciplines as well as linguistics, media and hypertext theory and other related fields. In addition, the periodical publishes work, which presents theorized methodologies and applications relevant to the creation and use of digital texts and text corpora, hypertext, databases, images, sound, video, and multimedia. It also provides a forum for discussing standards, resource management, and crucial legal and institutional concerns for the creation, management, and use of digital resources, as well as their effective integration into scholarly teaching and research.