Multilingual News Search—A Comparative User Study of Desktop and Mobile Interfaces

AbstractWith the global expansion of the Internet and the World Wide Web, users are becoming increasingly diverse, including their language proficiencies. In particular, there is now a significant number of polyglot Web users, i.e., users who are proficient in more than one language. However, even such users with potential access to a broad range of information from multiple languages often continue to suffer from unbalanced and fragmented news information, as traditional news access systems seldom allow users to simultaneously search for and/or compare news in different languages. To overcome language barriers, the majority of research has focused primarily on improving retrieval and translation accuracy, while paying comparably less attention to multilingual user interaction aspects. In particular, relatively little human-centered research has been conducted to better understand and support multilingual user abilities and preferences, and even less so regarding news search and different access modalities (such as desktop and mobile interfaces). The research presented in this article provides the first comparative analyses of polyglot users’ preferences and behaviors with respect to different multilingual news search interfaces on both desktop and mobile platforms. Specifically, through a set of task-based user studies in laboratory experiments, the key contribution of this article is the presentation of the first human-centered studies in multilingual news search result interfaces, aiming to drive the development of human-centered multilingual news access systems for both desktop and mobile platforms. This contribution includes a detailed analysis of different interface design paradigms, as well as a series of implications for design.Keywords: Multilingual newsmultilingual searchsearch interfaceshuman-centered computinguser studies Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 TREC—https://trec.nist.gov/.2 CLEF—Now called Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum—www.clef-initiative.eu. Interactive elements were explored as part of the iCLEF campaigns—nlp.uned.es/iCLEF/.3 The name “Universal Search” stems from the early attempts of search engines moving away from tabbed lists to integrated search engine result pages, whereby results from different search collections are shown in contiguous blocks (e.g., news results, image results, web results, etc.) (Google, Citation2007). This type of interface may also be referred to as “blended Aggregate Search” (Sushmita et al., Citation2010), as opposed to “non-blended Aggregate Search” (Sushmita et al., Citation2010), which refers to interfaces similar to “panels” mentioned above.4 datamarket.azure.com/dataset/bing/microsofttranslator—While there are many different machine translation techniques and tools, this was not the focus of this study. The Microsoft Translator API supports a large number of language pairs, and it was found to work sufficiently well for the topics used in the study tasks.5 datamarket.azure.com/dataset/bing/search.6 http://trends.google.com/trends/trendingsearches/realtime?geo=US&category=all7 https://index.baidu.com8 http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/bing-web-search-api/Additional informationNotes on contributorsBen SteichenBen Steichen received his PhD degree in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and he is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he leads the human-centered, adaptive, and personalized information interaction (hapii) lab.Chenjun LingChenjun Ling received her PhD degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Santa Clara University and she is currently the Senior Data Scientist (machine learning) at Wish, where she leads the buyer risk and fraud DS team.Silvia FigueiraSilvia Figueira received her PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego, and she is currently the Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Santa Clara University, where she leads the Frugal Innovation Hub and the Global Digital Transformation Clinic.