Haidar Moukdad

Users' Perceptions of the Web As Revealed by Transaction Log Analysis.

When information seekers use an information retrieval system their strategy is based, at least in part, on the perceptions they have formed about that environment. A random sample was gathered of more than 2,000 actual search queries submitted by users to one Web search engine, WebCrawler, in two separate capture sessions. The results suggest that a high proportion of users do not employ advanced search features, and those who do frequently misunderstand them. Furthermore, many users seem to have formed a model of the Web that imbues it with the intelligence found in a reference librarian, for example, but not a retrieval system. The linguistic structure of many queries resembles a typical human‐human communication model that is unlikely to produce satisfactory results in a human‐computer communication environment such as that offered currently by the Web. Design of more intuitive systems is dependent upon a more complete understanding of user behaviour at the intellectual and emotional as well as the technical levels.

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

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 271 Arabic 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.

Multilingual access to web resources: an overview

The World Wide Web offers access to information resources in many languages. Certain developments facilitate multilingual exploitation of these resources. Some search engines, for example, allow the user to restrict retrieved sites to those in particular languages; some also provide the searcher with an interface in a chosen language. Many web sites also offer their information in several languages, one of which typically is English. Systran, a machine translation system available from the AltaVista search engine, can even translate a search statement or a retrieved page from one language to another. Despite these features, however, language also creates obstacles to full exploitation of web resources. Not all languages are catered for by these multilingual tools. Machine translation output typically is but a rough and ready version of a human translation. The variety of scripts in which the written forms of the world’s languages appear also create major problems in searching, inputting, displaying and printing text in non‐roman scripts. The paper offers an overview of multilingual information access issues in relation to the Web.

Designing and developing multimedia CD‐ROMs: lessons from the Treasures of Islam

A multilingual and multimedia CD‐ROM containing rare Islamic works of art is designed and produced under fiscal constraints. The disparate rare materials are organised and presented through an intuitive interface based on a book metaphor for a diverse audience. The major portion of the cost (35 percent) was devoted to digitising the images, texts, audio and video segments. Approximately 20 percent of the production team’s time was spent on interface design, while an equal amount of time was spent on analysing and organising the collection of materials for inclusion in the CD‐ROM. The procedure and associated costs for developing this digital exhibition are discussed.

Web CLIR: An exploratory study of Google's new tool.

This poster reports on experiments conducted using Google Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) capabilities to explore the performance of the engine using English queries to retrieve Arabic documents. A hundred one-term English queries, using information retrieval (IR) terms, were entered in Google, and the top 10 documents retrieved by each query were saved in a local database. The saved documents were analyzed to determine the success of Google in retrieving the correct documents (documents that fit the translated terms) and to explore causes of search failures. The poster presents the results of the analyses conducted on the documents and identifies areas of improvement. It also recommends solutions to problems that hinder successful English-Arabic CLIR on the Web.