Jiangping Chen

Experimenting with the automatic assignment of educational standards to digital library content

This paper describes exploratory research concerning the automatic assignment of educational standards to lesson plans. An information retrieval based solution was proposed, and the results of several experiments are discussed. Results suggest the optimal solution would be a recommender tool where catalogers receive suggestions from the system but humans make the final decision

Information access across languages on the web: From search engines to digital libraries

Information access across languages challenges researchers and practitioners in many disciplines, especially machine translation (MT) and Cross-language Information Retrieval (CLIR). Googles cross-language search is a model that integrates MT and CLIR technologies to help users find information on the Web that is not written in their familiar languages. This paper overviews the functions of Googles cross-language search and its performance. It proposes strategies that digital libraries can apply for implementing multilingual information access through the discussion of the cases of five bilingual or multilingual digital libraries.

Collaboration and crowdsourcing: The cases of multilingual digital libraries

Purpose – This study aims to understand key features of existing multilingual digital libraries and to suggest strategies for building and/or sustaining multilingual information access for digital libraries.Design/methodology/approach – A case study approach was applied to examine four American multilingual digital libraries: Project Gutenberg, Meeting of Frontiers, The International Childrens Digital Library, and the Latin American Open Archives Portal. This examination used a framework derived from digital library evaluation practice. The missions, goals, funding, partners, users, collections, services, and technologies of these digital libraries were analyzed to present their key multilingual features. The collaboration and crowdsourcing characteristics were highlighted and discussed.Findings – These four multilingual libraries benefit substantially, both in the creation of the library and in its access, from the collaboration of groups domestic and international with different language expertise. For...

A preliminary analysis of the use of resources in intelligent information access research

This paper reports our exploratory analysis of the use of resources in three Intelligent Information Access (IIA) research areas: Automatic Classification, Question Answering, and Cross-Language Information Retrieval. Forty-three recently peer-reviewed papers from three annual conferences (SIGIR, ACL, and HLT) were selected and analyzed. The purpose of this analysis is twofold: 1) to explore methodological issues for large-scale content analysis of resources used in IIA research, and 2) to achieve a basic understanding of various ways that resources can be used in the three IIA subfields. The work reported in this paper is part of an effort to systematically explore the information needs for resources in Intelligent Information Access research.

An integrated participatory platform for human evaluation of machine translation

We describe the functions of HeMT, a multilingual participatory platform for Human Evaluation of Machine Translation. HeMT is used by three types of users including translators, evaluators, and reviewers. It consists of six major modules: User Management, Manual Translation, User Training, Evaluation, Result Visualization, and Multilingual Lexicon Management. HeMT can be used by Digital Libraries and Machine Translation communities for conducting manual translation, machine translation evaluation, and computer-assisted translation tasks.

The use of intelligent information access technologies in digital libraries

This paper discusses the use of intelligent information access (IIA) technologies in the development and services of digital libraries. After an introduction of the definition, subfields, and the characteristics of IIA, this paper reviews IIA-related research that has been recently published at leading digital library conferences. The authors suggest that applying IIA technologies to digital libraries may have the potential to greatly speed up the development of digital libraries and to improve the quality of user services. Digital library developers should consider collaborating with IIA researchers in order to build sustainable digital libraries. The paper concludes with a framework for integrating IIA technologies into digital library development and services.

Toward a unified retrieval outcome analysis framework for cross-language information retrieval

This paper proposes a Retrieval Outcome Analysis Framework, or ROA Framework, to systematically evaluate retrieval performance of Cross-Language Information Retrieval systems. The ROA framework goes beyond TREC-type retrieval evaluation methodology by including procedures focusing on individual queries, especially difficult queries. The framework is comprised of four interrelated components: (1) Overall System Performance Evaluation, (2) Query Categorization, (3) Translation Analysis, and (4) Individual Query Analysis. An example of applying the framework is discussed in detail. The author believes the proposed framework would be especially useful for the development of real-world CrossLanguage Information Retrieval systems because the evaluation guided by the framework has the potential to discover causes behind poor retrieval performance.

Generating and evaluating automatic metadata for educational resources

Metadata provides a higher-level description of digital library resources and serves as a searchable record for browsing and accessing digital library content. However, manually assigning metadata is a resource-consuming task for which Natural Language Processing (NLP) can provide a solution. This poster coalesces the findings from research and development accomplished across two multi-year digital library metadata generation and evaluation projects and suggests how the lessons learned might benefit digital libraries with the need for high-quality, but efficient metadata assignment for their resources.

Notice of Retraction What matters? An investigation of student collaborative e-learning

This paper reports a study conducted to understand students collaborative e-learning behavior within a team project in a graduate-level class. The effectiveness of collaborative e-learning is measured, and the factors affecting it are identified. The study finds that cognition, information communication, IT skill, member relationship, instructor guidance and supervision have a significant impact on collaborative e-learning. This research proposes a primitive model for collaborative e-learning. It will help educators to better design collaborative e-learning courses.

Enabling multilingual information access to digital collections: an investigation of metadata records translation

We conducted a research project exploring machine translation performance on digital metadata records. This short paper reports the background, research purposes, research design, experiments, and evaluation results.