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suggests additional words or phrases. Auto-suggest interfaces are already avail-
able in practice for general-purpose search engines with character-level comple-
tion (e.g., Google Suggest and Yahoo Search Assist), and a log-based longitudinal
study provides evidence that auto-suggest interfaces are rapidly prevailing [12].
Despite the increasing presence, there has been little user study on the ef-
fectiveness of auto-suggest interfaces [11]. There is a case for the word-level
completion with a general-purpose search engine [15]. In the experiment, the
participants made positive comments on the interface in the questionnaire, but
there was no statistically significant difference between the cases with and with-
out auto-suggest in terms of the users' search time
2
and quality of results [15].
The auto-suggest interface we developed for the document portal falls into
the type of the character-level suggestion for domain-dependent search. In this
interface, the suggested terms are ranked on the basis of a term-weighting method
that takes into account the domain vocabulary as well as entropy of topic in
the topic classification scheme created for the school document portal. In this
paper, we describe a user study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the domain-
dependent auto-suggest interface considering the cases without auto-suggest and
domain vocabulary. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The
school document portal site is briefly introduced in the next section, and the
section 3 explains the auto-suggest interface integrated with the search box of
the portal. The section 4 presents the evaluation method, and finally the results
of evaluation and our findings are given in the section 5.
2 Multilingual School Document Portal Site
Multilingual school documents are composed mostly of parallel texts line-by-line
in both Japanese and a target language. Figure 1 shows an example of a school
document. Most school documents are created separately for each language by
translation staff members, and handed out from a class teacher to foreign children
to notify school activities and schedules to their parents/guardians. The school
document portal site as a faceted navigation system allows users to find items
on the basis of multiple aspects or facets, instead of forcing the users to view
items from a single classification hierarchy.
As shown in Figure 2, the top page of the portal site
3
displays several facets
that characterize multilingual school documents: topic, language, file type, and
area of document owning institution. For example, if a school teacher needs
to prepare a document of health checkup prior to a school activity, which is
handed out to Spanish children and expected to be available in a PDF format.
The teacher as a portal user may start by selecting ”Spanish” from the language
2
Since the user interface was not responsive taking 1.8 seconds on an average until
the suggested terms were displayed [15], the benefit of the auto-suggest interface was
not be fully utilized in the experiment.
3
The school document portal is currently afforded to Japanese school teachers, and
the site in itself is available only in Japanese. The screen copies in this paper are
translated in English for the explanation purpose.
