The tower of Babel meets web 2.0: user-generated content and its applications in a multilingual context

This study explores language's fragmenting effect on usergenerated content by examining the diversity of knowledge representations across 25 different Wikipedia language editions. This diversity is measured at two levels: the concepts that are included in each edition and the ways in which these concepts are described. We demonstrate that the diversity present is greater than has been presumed in the literature and has a significant influence on applications that use Wikipedia as a source of world knowledge. We close by explicating how knowledge diversity can be beneficially leveraged to create "culturally-aware applications" and "hyperlingual applications". Author Keywords Wikipedia, knowledge diversity, multilingual, hyperlingual, Explicit Semantic Analysis, semantic relatedness ACM Classification Keywords H.5.3. [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Brent Hecht, Darren Gergle
• Keywords: Author Keywords Wikipedia, CHI 2010, Human Computer Interaction, Semantic Relatedness Acm, Wikipedia Language Editions