1. College of Information
Connecting with Users beyond Language Boundaries through Multilingual Information Access for Digital Collections
Jiangping Chen
May

2. Presentation Outline We need your help!
The Metadata Records Translation (MRT) Project
The concept of Multilingual Information Access
Research goals
Research plan
HeMT: An integrated multilingual participatory platform
HeMT Users
Functions
Collaboration and crowdsourcing
We need your help!
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

3. Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

4. What is Multilingual Information Access (MLIA)?
An extension of Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR)
To facilitate universal information access by overcoming language barriers
Includes but not limited to:
CLIR, CLQA, Cross-Language Summarization,
Bilingual or multilingual searching, browsing, and presentation.
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

5. Chinese-English Information Retrieval
Queries (C)
Query Translation
Queries (E)
Results (C)
Results (E)
English Documents
MT System
DL or IR system
Sample query: 白内障有哪些新药？
What are the newest medicines/treatments for cataract?
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

6. Chinese-English Information Retrieval
MT System
English Documents
Chinese Documents
Queries (C)
DL or IR system
Results (C)
Sample query:白内障有哪些新药？
What are the newest medicines/treatments for cataract?
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

7. MLIA is Important Information creators and users are multilingual
The need to access information in many languages
For economic development
For knowledge sharing/cultural exchange
For learning
For national security
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

8. MLIA is Difficult MLIA involves translation
Translation is difficult even for professional translators.
Machine translation is considered the most difficult natural language processing problem
Information retrieval (IR) is challenging
Understanding users’ information needs is difficult
Even the most sophisticated IR algorithm cannot satisfy every user
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

9. MLIA Research Fortunately, significant progress has been made in MLIA
MLIA Evaluation Forums: TREC, NTCIR, CLEF
Statistical MT workshops
Google had launched a cross-language search (2007 – 2011), which built upon many years of research in Machine translation (MT) and Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR)
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

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13. MLIA for Digital Libraries
Digital library users are multilingual
Many digital collections are multilingual
MLIA research has been conducted for years, but real applications of the research results to digital libraries are rare
MT systems are producing promising results
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

14. Bilingual or Multilingual Digital Libraries in the United States
Library Name
URL
Languages
Meeting of Frontiers
English/Russian
France in America
English/French
Parallel Histories
English/Spanish
International Children's Digital Library
Digital Objects in 11 languages. Users can do the keyword search in 51 languages.
The Perseus Digital Library
Greek, English, Latin
Chen & Ruiz – SIGIR 2009

15. The Five Digital Libraries Share the Following Characteristics
They have been funded by various funding agencies, especially from the federal government;
They are the products of collaboration. People from different countries work together to produce the bilingual or multilingual collections;
They serve a broader or global user community in which users speak different languages;
They Do Not employ cross-language information retrieval techniques or machine translation.
Chen & Ruiz – SIGIR 2009

16. MLIA for DL: Questions/Concerns
How useful are current MLIA and MT technologies for digital libraries?
What are the costs and benefits for DLs to provide multilingual information access?
Are there other solutions to language barriers for MLIA in DLs?
Crowdsourcing
Computer-assisted mechanisms
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

17. Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

18. The Metadata Records Translation (MRT) Project
A collaborative project among four units in three countries – UNT college of Information, UNT Libraries, Wuhan University in China, and UAEM in Mexico
Two-year research project funded by IMLS National Leadership Grant and UNT
The goals include: (1) to understand to what extent current MT technologies generate adequate translation for metadata records and (2) to explore effective metadata records translation strategies for digital collections.
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

19. Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

20. HeMT: an Integrated Multilingual Participatory Platform
A database-driven Web application serving three different types of users
With interfaces (webpages) in three languages: English, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish.
Easy to use for translators and evaluators
the system will be used by evaluators from the US, China, and Mexico. So it is important to keep the system easy to understand, fast uploaded, images should be minimized
Extendable to other languages – desire a language independent database structure
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

21. HeMT Homepage
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

22. HeMT Users
Translators: conduct manual translation of metadata records;
Recruited from Texas
Reviewers: Monitor system progress, update multilingual term list
The research team
Evaluators: conduct human evaluation of the system
Recruited from China, Mexico, and U.S.
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

23. HeMT Site Map HeMT Homepage User Registration Training Lesson
New Evaluator
Reviewer
New User
Evaluator
Translator
User Registration
Training Lesson
Evaluation Start Page
Manual Translation
Monitoring & Visualization
User Profile Revision
Individual MT System Evaluation
Comparative Evaluation
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

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25. Training of the Evaluators
Train lesson is in three languages
The lesson describes
The MRT project and its purposes
Procedures for evaluators
Evaluation measures (such as adequacy, fluency, best system, worst system, etc) and the criteria for assign values to these measures
Comments: when and how should I provide comments?
Quiz at the end of the lesson to make sure evaluators understand how to do evaluation
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

26. Training Lesson in Chinese
Training home page in Chinese
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27. Training Lesson in Spanish
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31. The Bottom Part of the Individual Evaluation Page
2018/9/19
Jiangping Chen

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33. The Bottom Part of the Comparative Evaluation Page
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

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36. Comments on Crowdsourcing and Collaboration for MRT Project
Collaboration is crucial to achieve the goal of this project
Partners, consultants
Crowdsourcing may save money, but may require more time and more effective management
Online training lesson for participants are important
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

37. Next Step ……
We need more people for evaluating Spanish machine translation results
Please pick a handout if you or anyone you know may be interested in participation
We want to collaborate with institutions that have metadata records in Simplified Chinese or Spanish for training our MT system
We want to collaborate with U.S. DLs to evaluate MT for MLIA
Jiangping Chen - TCDL 2012

38. Thank You! College of Information
Any comments, suggestions are welcome!
Please contact: