Towards a Web search service for minority language communities
Baden Hughes · Minerva Access (University of Melbourne) · 2006
Locating resources of interest on the web in the general case is at best a low precision activity owing to the large number of pages on the web (for example, Google covers more than 8 billion web pages). As language communities (at all points on the spectrum) increasingly self-publish materials on the web, so interested users are beginning to search for them in the same way that they search for general internet resources, using broad coverage search engines with typically simple queries. Given that language resources are in a minority case on the web in general, finding relevant materials for low density or lesser used languages on the web is in general an increasingly inefficient exercise even for experienced searchers. Furthermore, the inconsistent coverage of web content between search engines serves to complicate matters even more. A number of previous research efforts have focused on using web data to create language corpora, mine linguistic data, building language ontologies, create thesaurii etc. The work reported in this paper contrasts with previous research in that it is not specifically oriented towards creation of language resources from web data directly, but rather, increasing the likelihood that end users searching for resources in minority languages will actually find useful results from web searches. Similarly, it differs from earlier work by virtue of its focus on search optimization directly, rather than as a component of a larger process (other researchers use the seed URIs discovered via the mechanism described in this paper in their own varied work). The work here can be seen to contribute to a user-centric agenda for locating language resources for lesser-used languages on the web. (From Introduction)