A user-centric approach to identifying best deployment strategies for language tools: the impact of content and access language on Web user behaviour and attitudes

Abstract

The number of Web users whose first language is not English continues to grow, as does the amount of content provided in languages other than English. This poses new challenges for actors on the Web, such as in which language(s) content should be offered, how search tools should deal with mono-and multilingual content, and how users can make the best use of navigation and search options, suited to their individual linguistic skills. How should these challenges be dealt with? Technological approaches to nonEnglish (or in general, cross-language) Web search have made large progress; however, translation remains a hard problem. This precludes a low-cost but high-quality blanket alllanguage coverage of the whole Web. In this paper, we propose a user-centric approach to answering questions of where to best concentrate efforts and investments. Drawing on linguistic research, we describe data on the availability of content and access to it in first and second languages across the Web. We then present three studies that investigated the impact of the availability (or not) of first-language content and access forms on user behaviour and attitudes. The results indicate that non-English languages are under-represented on the Web and that this is partly due to content-creation, link-setting and linkfollowing behaviour. They also show that user satisfaction is influenced both by the cognitive effort of searching and the availability of alternative information in that language. These findings suggest that more cross-language tools are desirable. However, they also indicate that context (such as user groups' domain expertise or site type) should be considered when tradeoffs between information quality and multilinguality need to be taken into account.

E-Government and the Digital Divide: A Study of English-as-a-Second-Language Users’ Information Behaviour

“…They also noted this facility had language selection, although no participant used an alternative language to English. This is found to confirm the notion that lower cognitive effort of the search option (in this case the wizard) can directly affect the preference of said search option [2]. It also highlights the point regarding the language of the in-site links' diminishing the multilinguality of the web.…”

“…A number of studies have looked at multilingual IR, with a rising number of studies investigating the information seeking behaviour of users in relation to language proficiency, notably when English is the foreign language [2,3,13]. Research by [2] focused on web content (or lack thereof) in the user's native language and the impact it had on user satisfaction through cognitive load.…”

“…Research by [2] focused on web content (or lack thereof) in the user's native language and the impact it had on user satisfaction through cognitive load.…”

Investigating Language Skills and Field of Knowledge on Multilingual Information Access in Digital Libraries

“…Previous research has highlighted a digital divide online due to language barriers (Paolillo, 2005;Kralisch, 2005;Kralisch & Mandl, 2006;Flammia & Saunders, 2007;Berendt & Kralisch, 2009). An overarching theme throughout the past work has been a language bias towards English and this has been reflected in the analysis carried out.…”

A Comparative Study of Native and Non-native Information Seeking Behaviours

“…Despite the fact that recent figures suggest that only slightly over a quarter of all Internet users are English native speakers [21], relatively little research effort is put into improving the quality of non-English web search [15]. Research has found that, despite the increasing number of users who speak English as a second language (ESL), or do not speak English at all, the extent and quality of content in other languages often does not meet the needs of said users [3]. In addition to this, even when there is sufficient content available, there are a considerable number of mostly unresolved complexities and issues of monolingual search in non-English languages [15,22].…”