Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Dynamic Term Suggestion for Searching
Multilingual School Documents
Kohei Sawa
1
, Yusuke Okano
2
, Masahiro Hori
1
, and Chigusa Kita
1
1
Graduate School of Informatics, Kansai University
2-1-1 Ryozenji-cho, Takatsuki-shi, Osaka 569-1095 Japan
{
horim,ckita
}
@res.kutc.kansai-u.ac.jp
2
Faculty of Informatics, Kansai University
2-1-1 Ryozenji-cho, Takatsuki-shi, Osaka 569-1095 Japan
Abstract.
The number of school children having ties overseas is on the
rise year after year in Japan. In order to support these children and their
parents, we developed a multilingual school document portal site, and
made it open to the public. The portal site allows easy-to-use document
retrieval by faceted classification as well as keyword search. However, it
is not necessarily easy for the users to express their information needs
in query terms, and they often come up with poor results from short
and generic query terms. In pursuit of the formulation of better query
statements with a few search terms even in the initial query, we realized
a dynamic term suggestion or auto-suggest interface in the portal site.
In the auto-suggest interface, suggested terms are ranked according to
domain relevance, rather than merely on the basis of term occurrence fre-
quency in the document collection. In this paper, we explain an overview
of the school document portal site, the auto-suggest interface realized in
the portal, and the domain-dependent term-weighting scheme, followed
by the results of a user study conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness
of the auto-suggest function.
Keywords:
Auto-suggest, dynamic term suggestion, faceted search,
domain vocabulary, multilingual school document, portal site.
1
Introduction
The number of residents having ties overseas is on the rise in Japan, and cur-
rently, more than twenty-five thousand children, who do not speak Japanese
as their mother language, live in Japan. According to a survey by Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2008 [1], the top three
foreign languages (i.e., Portuguese, Chinese, and Spanish) to be supported in
Japanese school constitute 72.9% of the total number of school children whose
mother language are not Japanese. In addition to these top three, the top seven
languages, which include Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, and English, constitute
94.1% of the total number [2]. In schools that accept pupils with international
background, it is widely known that to overcome the diculty of communication
