Improving the Multilingual User Experience of Wikipedia Using Cross-Language Name Search

Although Wikipedia has emerged as a powerful collaborative Encyclopedia on the Web, it is only partially multilingual as most of the content is in English and a small number of other languages. In real-life scenarios, nonEnglish users in general and ESL/EFL 1 users in particular, have a need to search for relevant English Wikipedia articles as no relevant articles are available in their language. The multilingual experience of such users can be significantly improved if they could express their information need in their native language while searching for English Wikipedia articles. In this paper, we propose a novel crosslanguage name search algorithm and employ it for searching English Wikipedia articles in a diverse set of languages including Hebrew, Hindi, Russian, Kannada, Bangla and Tamil. Our empirical study shows that the multilingual experience of users is significantly improved by our approach.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: NAACL
• Authors: Raghavendra Udupa, Mitesh M. Khapra
• Keywords: Computational Linguistics, English Wikipedia Articles, Multilingual Experience, NAACL 2010, Relevant English Wikipedia