Here, BIrefers to the product of
acquisition, interpretation, collation, assessment, and exploitation
of information in the business
domain [ 4]. CBizPort includes two
versions of its user interface—one
for simplified Chinese, one for traditional Chinese—each with the
same look and feel. Relying on a Virtual Arabic keyboard
conversion dictionary with 6,737
Chinese characters in each of the
two encodings (Big5 and GB2312),
the encoding converter converted
all Chinese characters into the
encoding of the interface version.
The eight information sources used
in the portal’s meta-searching are
major Chinese search engines and Click to summarize in
business-related portals from the 3 or 5 sentences.
three regions. Relying on two Chi-nese-phrase lexicons to extract
phrases, the portal’s categorizer
organizes retrieved Web pages into
various folders labeled with the key
phrases in the page summaries and
titles.
The Spanish Web portal (
SBizPort) supports searching and browsing of business information from
22 Spanish-speaking regions. In
addition to keyword searching,
summarization, and categorization,
like those in CBizPort, SBizPort
provides a comprehensive collection of business Web pages for
searching and supports visualization of retrieved pages (see Figure
2). Users visualize Web pages by
clicking on a region to see a list of
pages on the right and open pages by clicking the
link-embedded titles.
The Arabic Web portal, AMedPort (see Figure 3)
focuses on the medical domain in some 22 Arab
regions and supports all search and browse functions
available in SBizPort. AMedPort includes a customized user interface with a right-to-left text display
and a virtual keyboard to facilitate Arabic input.
Retrieved pages titles and
abstracts are listed.
Figure 3.
Screenshots from
AMedPort.
EXPERIMENTAL FINDINGS
Sixty native speakers participated in the experiments
(detailed in [ 3, 6]) of the three Web portals to evaluate the framework’s usability in supporting Web
searching in a multilingual world (see Table 2). In
each experiment (about an hour), a Web portal was
The user types “excretion” to
search for medical information
about the topic in Arab
regions.
Retrieved pages are
categorized into folders
labeled with key phrases.
The summary is listed on
the left, while he original
page is on the right.
The SOM visualizer categories
30 Web pages onto six regions
and displays hyperlinks on the
right.
compared with a benchmark search engine in each
of the three languages. Each subject was introduced
to the portal and the benchmark search engine and
was randomly assigned different task scenarios (one
scenario per system). Each scenario contained three
or four search and browse tasks based on standards
developed through the National Institute of Standards and Technology Text Retrieval Conference
( trec.nist.gov). All questionnaires used in the experiment were administered in the subjects’ native language. Subjects spent an average of three minutes to
finish a search task and eight minutes to finish a
browse task. The order in which the systems were
used was randomly assigned to avoid bias due to the
sequence of use.
Several information-retrieval measures—precision,
recall, and F value—revealed the search and browse
effectiveness of the system by computing the ratios
between the number of relevant results found by a
