Dynamic Term Suggestion for Searching Multilingual School Documents - Culture and Computing - page 89

Fig. 2. Top page of the multilingual school document portal site
the keyword search is easy to use and helpful, it is not necessarily obvious for
the users to select terms effectively navigate the search space. By looking into
the search log of the portal site, there were cases where the users typed in generic
terms (e.g., checkup, school ,and communication ), which did not contribute to
narrowing down the search results.
In order to help searchers improve query statements, query expansion tech-
niques have been investigated [14]. Query expansion is to build a new or modified
query by supplementing with additional terms, and can be performed manually,
automatically or interactively [14]. Interactive query expansion (IQE) is a po-
tentially useful technique to improve queries by incorporating users' decision
upon the term selection. However, IQE has not often been used in operational
systems due to insucient integration with search interfaces without substantial
help during the initial query formulation [15]. For instance, a real-time query
expansion [15] is proposed as an extension of IQE, which allows dynamic term
expansion even during the initial query formulation, but it is still less interactive
because the expansion is performed only at the word level. The dynamic term
suggestion we adopted here is also a sort of real-time query expansion, and more
responsive due to the expansion at the character level rather than the word level.
Moreover, it is reported that subject knowledge facilitates increasing the ex-
tent and specificity of the queries made by searchers familiar with the sub-
ject, and contributes to the improvement of search effectiveness [16]. Therefore,