Overview

There is an increasing number of non-English resource available on the Web. However, most information retrieval techniques have been developed for English and other Western languages. As the second largest Internet language, Chinese provides a good setting for study of how search engine techniques developed for English could be generalized for use in other languages to facilitate Internet searching and browsing in a multilingual world. We present our research in developing a Chinese Web portal in the Medical domain: CMedPort. Our portal integrates focused collection building technique, metasearch engines, cross-regional search technique, as well as post retrieval analysis technique, such as summarization and categorization. Pilot user studies were conducted to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of CMedPort with those of three major Chinese search engines. Preliminary results from these user studies indicate that CMedPort achieved similar precision, but higher recall and higher efficiency than the regional search engines.

14.1 Introduction

The increasing diversity of the Internet has created a tremendous number of information resources on the Web. Web pages have been written in almost every popular language in the world, including various Asian, European, and Middle East languages. Online information in languages other than English grows even faster. Although globalization has been a major Internet trend, most research in information retrieval (IR) has involved only English, and as non-English speakers...