D-Lib Magazine
December 1997

ISSN 1082-9873

Clips and Pointers

Report on the EU-NSF Working Group on Multilingual Information Access

Judith L. Klavans
Center for Research on Information Access
Columbia University
klavans@cs.columbia.edu

Peter Schäuble
ETH Zurich
schäuble@inf.ethz.ch

The first meeting of a new working group on Multilingual Information Access for Digital Libraries took place November 16-18, 1997 at the Columbia University Arden Homestead in New York under the joint sponsorship of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the European Union (EU). This working group is part of a larger international collaboration between the NSF and the EU that brings together American and European scientists engaged in digital library research to plan common research agendas, share research results, and explore national, technical, and social expectations about digital libraries. The focus of the Multilingual Information Access working group is on the problems faced by the international community with storage, access and presentation of information in any of the world's languages. Other groups are addressing interoperability, metadata, intellectual property and commerce mechanisms, and resource indexing and discovery in a globally distributed digital library. Each working group includes approximately ten members.

The Multilingual Information Access working group includes researchers from information retrieval and natural language processing, two fields that are converging increasingly in the area of information access. Two primary areas of research were addressed during the first meeting: first, the problem of encoding, manipulating and displaying information in any language; and second, methods for querying, retrieving and presenting that information. The discussion concentrated on understanding user needs, identifying existing tools and resources, and prioritizing research issues for near, medium, and long-term planning. For example, there is a growing need to support access to documents in many languages with retrieval systems that can accept queries in the native or preferred language of the user. Furthermore, an accurate profile of the user's linguistic capabilities would allow retrieved information to be presented without translation when possible, but translated or summarized in another language when needed. At the second working group meeting, scheduled for March, 1998 in Zurich, it is hoped that a representative from the Pacific Rim will also be present to enhance the group with additional perspectives. In that meeting the group is expected to complete the user needs assessment, refine the set of research issues, and prioritize the research agenda.

The long-term aim is to assist the multilingual information access community to identify research directions towards which future efforts should most usefully be concentrated. The working group plans to produce a white paper containing findings and recommendations in the summer of 1998. Since the Multilingual Information Access working group seeks to serve the larger Digital Library community, comments and recommendations from researchers interested in these issues will be invited.

Additional information about the working group and contact information for the participants is available on the group's web site at <http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~klavans/Activities/MIA/home.html> or from the working group co-chairs: Judith Klavans (USA) <klavans@cs.columbia.edu> and Peter Schäuble (EU) <schauble@inf.ethz.ch>. The working group is funded by the National Science Foundation through the University of Michigan (Grant Number 9605202) <http://www.si.umich.edu/UMDL/EU_Grant/home.htm> and by the European Union through the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) <http://www-ercim.inria.fr>.

New D-Lib Working Group on Digital Library Metrics Formed

Much of digital library research is experimental or exploratory. Research projects lead to demonstrations, pilot systems, and eventually to deployment in production systems. Currently, there are few ways to evaluate the effectiveness of research, or to measure progress towards long-term goals despite a long tradition of user and usability studies in fields as diverse as library science and engineering. A notable exception is information retrieval, which has been greatly enhanced by the existence of the well-established measures of precision and recall. These metrics, in conjunction with standard corpora that can be used for testing and evaluation, have helped further the state of the art by allowing researchers to do comparisons and evaluations on a fair comparison basis.

While these measures have been very useful in evaluating and comparing "single site", "batch oriented" search and retrieval mechanisms, the richness of the digital library environment demands a much richer set of metrics. Metrics are required to deal with issues such as the distributed nature of the digital library, the importance of user interfaces to the system, and the need for systems approaches to deal with heterogeneity amongst the various components of the digital library.

To address this issue, a new Working Group on Digital Library Metrics has been formed under the auspices of the D-Lib Program. This Working Group is to develop a consensus on an appropriate set of metrics to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of digital libraries and component technologies in a distributed environment. Initial emphasis will be on (a) information discovery with a human in the loop, and (b) retrieval in a heterogeneous world.

More information on the Working Group may be found on the D-Lib home page: <www.dlib.org>. Although most of the work of the group is planned to be conducted via email and the net, a kickoff meeting is scheduled for 7-8 January 1998 at Stanford University.

In Print

• Building the Digital Research Library: Preservation and Access at the Heart of Scholarship, Peter S. Graham, Associate University Librarian, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. This is the 1997 Follett lecture, given March 19, 1997. The text is accompanied by a transcript of the questions and answers that followed the paper.

• The reports from the conference, "Building the Global Information Society for the 21st Century: New Applications and Business Opportunities - Coherent Standards and Regulations", held October 1-3, 1997 are now available. Four topics are covered: Electronic Commerce, Services to the Public, Individual Use, and Interoperability. The Plenary has also been posted.

Point-to-Point

• LibLicense: Licensing Digital Information, A Resource for Librarians, a site maintained by the Yale University Library, contains a number of resources and pointers to resources important to librarians, publishers, and related content providers. A brief licensing vocabulary is provided as well as example license agreements. A pointer to the Dutch-German Joint Licensing Principles and Guidelines is also included.

• Museo Picasso Virtual is a multi-lingual (Catalan, English, French, Spanish) virtual museum with the following components:
  • a digital archive of scanned images to support teaching and research
  • biographical information
  • full texts of critical studies organized topically (e.g., "Picasso and Cubism")
  • a catalog of museums holding Picasso's works
  • a bibliography
  • links to other sites

• Version 14 of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, last updated November 26, 1997, has been released. The structure of the bibliography is as follows:
  1. Economic Issues (Last update: 10/16/97)
  2. Electronic Books and Texts
     1. Case Studies and History (Last update: 10/16/97)
     2. General Works (Last update: 9/16/97)
     3. Library Issues (Last update: 10/16/97)
  3. Electronic Serials
     1. Case Studies and History (Last update: 11/26/97)
     2. Critiques (Last update: 4/11/97)
     3. Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals (Last update: 11/26/97)
     4. General Works (Last update: 11/26/97)
     5. Library Issues (Last update: 11/26/97)
     6. Research (Last update: 8/25/97)
  4. General Works (Last update: 8/25/97)
  5. Legal Issues
     1. Intellectual Property Rights (Last update: 7/11/97)
     2. License Agreements (Last update: 10/16/97)
     3. Other Legal Issues (Last update: 9/16/97)
  6. Library Issues
     1. Cataloging, Classification, and Metadata (Last update: 11/26/97)
     2. Digital Libraries (Last update: 11/26/97)
     3. General Works (Last update: 9/16/97)
     4. Information Conversion, Integrity, and Preservation (Last update: 11/26/97)
  7. New Publishing Models (Last update: 10/16/97)
  8. Publisher Issues (Last update: 7/11/97)
     1. Electronic Commerce/Copyright Systems (Last update: 10/16/97)

Goings On

• The American Library Association will hold its Midwinter Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, from January 10 to January 12, 1998. Advance registration is closed. On-site registration will begin January 9, 1998.

• Seventh UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, January 13-22,1998, New York. The agenda for this conference can be found at http://GeoNames.NRCan.GC.CA/english/unagenda_NY.html. The site contains information on prior conferences and background information on the United Nations' activities in standardizing geographical names.

• Euro-Med Net 98 Conference: The Role of Internet and the World Wide Web in Developing the Euro-Mediterranean Information Society, March 4-7, 1998, Nicosia, Cyprus. Call for Papers closes January 15, 1998. This conference is a direct follow up of the May 1996 Rome Ministerial Conference and is hosted by the University of Cyprus (UCY) with the support of Ministry of Communication & Works - Cyprus; European Commission - DG IB, III, XIII; and with the assistance of ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Mathematics & Informatics), CYTA (Cyprus Telecommunications Authority), the Cyprus Government Planning Bureau, and the Cyprus Department of Data Processing Services. The conference proposes to address a broad range of themes associated with creating an information society based on World Wide Web technologies including, but not limited to, digital libraries and museums, multimedia applications, computer-human interface, electronic publishing and design, multilinguality, information retrieval, and security and privacy. Guidelines for submissions, program, and registration information are available via the site.

• The Information Connection: Implementing Effective Technologies in Healthcare, January 28-30, 1998, University of Vermont, Burlington. The themes of the conference include the following:
  • Applying technology in the clinical setting (patient monitoring, primary and specialty care, medical education, electronic medical records, medical data management, multidisciplinary models)

  • Structuring organizations to benefit from technology (legal concerns, clinical processes, administrative challenges, technological applications, cost-benefit analyses, value-added health centers)

  • Evaluating the Impact of Technology on Healthcare Outcomes (clinical decision-making, cost-effectiveness, continuous quality improvement, variations in care, provider and patient satisfaction, technological processes, needs assessment)

• IBERAMIA-98: Sixth Iberoamerican Conference on Artificial Intelligence, October 5-9, 1998, Lisbon, Portugal. Call for papers closes Wednesday, January 28, 1998 for e-mail submissions, and Monday, February 2, 1998 for surface mail submissions. Submissions are requested in the following areas: agent-oriented programming, case-based reasoning, computer vision, constraint programming, data mining tools and applications, explanation mechanisms, foundations issues, genetic algorithms, hypothetical reasoning, intelligent information retrieval, intelligent tutoring and learning environments, knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge-based systems validation, model-based reasoning, multi-agent and distributed problem-solving, natural language and speech, neural nets, robotics, temporal and spatial reasoning, machine learning. Papers may be written in English; the first track will be mainly in the Latin languages (Portuguese and Spanish) but the second track will only be in English.

• The 4th European Bielefeld Colloquium: Libraries and Publishers as Main Players in the Information Society, February 10-12, 1998, Stadthalle Bielefeld, will address the relationship between publishers and libraries in the information society and the role of regions, states and the European Union in the context of global communications networks. The Conference is sponsored by British Council, Cologne, the Buchhändler-Vereinigung, Frankfurt am Main, and the University of Bielefeld. The agenda features presentations on national programs and initiatives as well as discussions of continuing education and training, electronic copyright, and electronic publishing.

• JFA '98: Thirteenth French-speaking Conference on Machine Learning, Arras, May 18-20, 1998. Call for papers closes February 13, 1998. Papers may be submitted in English but the final version must be in French. Submissions are requested in the following areas: applications of machine learning, case-based learning, computational learning theory, data mining, evolutionary computation, hybrid learning systems, inductive learning, inductive logic programming, knowledge discovery in databases, language learning, learning and problem solving, learning by analogy, learning in multi-agent systems, learning in dynamic domains, learning to search, multistrategy learning, neural networks, reinforcement learning, robot learning, scientific discovery.

Pointers in This Column:

4th European Bielefeld Colloquium: Libraries and Publishers as Main Players in the Information Society Stadthalle Bielefeld February 10-12, 1998	http://www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/aktuell/koll-eng.htm
American Library Association Midwinter Meeting January 10-12, 1998 New Orleans, Louisiana	http://www.ala.org/events/mw98/
Building the Digital Research Library: Preservation and Access at the Heart of Scholarship Peter S. Graham	http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/follett/graham/paper.html
Building the Global Information Society for the 21st Century: New Applications and Business Opportunities - Coherent Standards and Regulations October 1-3, 1997 Reports	http://www.ispo.cec.be/standards/conf97/reports.html
Digital Library Collaboratory Working Groups		http://www.si.umich.edu/UMDL/EU_Grant/home.htm
Euro-Med Net 98 Conference: The Role of Internet and the World Wide Web in Developing the Euro-Mediterranean Information Society Nicosia, Cyprus March 4-7, 1998	http://www.euromednet.ucy.ac.cy
European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM)		http://www-ercim.inria.fr
IBERAMIA-98: Sixth Iberoamerican Conference on Artificial Intelligence October 5-9, 1998 Lisbon, Portugal	http://www-ssdi.di.fct.unl.pt/~iberamia/
The Information Connection: Implementing Effective Technologies in Healthcare University of Vermont, Burlington January 28-30, 1998	http://uvmce.uvm.edu:443/infoconn/infocon.htm
JFA '98: Thirteenth French-speaking Conference on Machine Learning, Arras May 18-20, 1998	http://www.univ-artois.fr/jfa98/jfa98_uk.html
LibLicense: Licensing Digital Information, A Resource for Librarians	http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/index.shtml
Museo Picasso Virtual	http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso/
Multilingual Information Access Working Group	http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~klavans/Activities/MIA/home.html
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography Version 14 Updated November 26, 1997	http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html
Seventh UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names January 13-22,1998, New York	http://GeoNames.NRCan.GC.CA/english/unindex.html

Copyright © 1997 Corporation for National Research Initiatives

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