research-article

Online Searching in English as a Foreign Language

Authors:

Gyöngyi Rózsa,

Anita Komlodi,

Peng ChuAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '15 Companion: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web

Pages 875 - 880

https://doi.org/10.1145/2740908.2743007

Published: 18 May 2015 Publication History

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Abstract

Online searching is a central element of internet users' information behaviors. Searching is usually executed in a user's native language, but searching in English as a foreign language is often necessitated by the lack of content in languages that are underrepresented in Web content. This paper reports results from a study of searching in English as a foreign language and aims at understanding this particular group of users' behaviors. Searchers whose native language is not English may have to resort to queries in English in support of their information needs due to the lack or low quality of the web content in their own language. However, when searching for information in a foreign language, users face a unique set of challenges that are not present for native language searching. We studied this problem through qualitative research methods and report results from focus groups in this paper. The results reported in this paper describe typical problems foreign language searchers face, the differences in information-seeking behavior in English and in the participants' native language, and advice and ideas shared by the focus group participants about how to search effectively and efficiently in English.

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Zhang YGao G(2024)Assisting International Migrants with Everyday Information Seeking: From the Providers’ LensWisdom, Well-Being, Win-Win10.1007/978-3-031-57867-0_26(338-355)Online publication date: 10-Apr-2024
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Sendurur EGabriel S(2023)Evaluation of search engine results pages in various languages and contents: the changes in strategies and criteriaThe Electronic Library10.1108/EL-05-2023-011142:2(173-192)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2023
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Index Terms

Online Searching in English as a Foreign Language
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Philosophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence
      1. Cognitive science
2. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

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Published In

WWW '15 Companion: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web

May 2015

1602 pages

ISBN:9781450334730

DOI:10.1145/2740908

General Chairs:
Aldo Gangemi
National Research Council, Italy & Paris 13 University-CNRS, France
,
Stefano Leonardi
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
,
Alessandro Panconesi
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

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SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 May 2015

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Google Faculty Research Award

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WWW '15

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IW3C2

WWW '15: 24th International World Wide Web Conference

May 18 - 22, 2015

Florence, Italy

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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Zhang YGao G(2024)Assisting International Migrants with Everyday Information Seeking: From the Providers’ LensWisdom, Well-Being, Win-Win10.1007/978-3-031-57867-0_26(338-355)Online publication date: 10-Apr-2024
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Evaluation of search quality differences and the impact of personality styles in native and foreign language searching tasks

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