Intercomprehension in Retrieval: User Perspectives on Six Related Scarce Resource Languages

Chavula, Catherine and Suleman, Hussein (2020) Intercomprehension in Retrieval: User Perspectives on Six Related Scarce Resource Languages, Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR), 13-14 August 2020, Virtual, 263-272, Association for Computing Machinery.

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Abstract

The majority of web content is published in languages not accessible to many potential users who may only be able to read and understand their local languages. Prior research has focused on using translation to provide users with information written in other languages, yet there are still many languages with little or no such resources. In this paper, we propose the use of intercomprehension - a form of communication in which speakers of two different languages communicate using their own languages, mainly due to similarities between the languages. Accordingly, we conducted a user study to explore user interaction behaviour in a retrieval environment where intercomprehension is expected; to investigate the usefulness of search results, which assumes intelligibility and relevance; and investigate affective episodes associated with intercomprehension in retrieval through retrospection. Although intercomprehension may come with a cost to understand unfa- miliar languages, user preference of ranking of results in related languages incorporates intelligibility, which assumes intercomprehension. Our findings also suggest that intercomprehension is useful in retrieval for related languages - users are able to identify relevant documents as well as complete search tasks by applying intercomprehension. However, the negative emotions or frustration associated with intercomprehension suggest that this type of interaction should be used in extreme cases where there are no relevant or few documents available associated with the query.

Item Type:	Conference paper
Subjects:	Information systems > Information retrieval > Users and interactive retrieval
Alternate Locations:	https://doi.org/10.1145/3343413.3377954
Date Deposited:	21 Dec 2020 11:27
Last Modified:	21 Dec 2020 11:27
URI:	http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1403

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