Finding Things You Can't Read: Interactive Cross-Language Search for Monolingual Users

Speech recognition and machine translation techniques are evolving rapidly, creating new opportunities to build systems that can support information seeking in large collections of multilingual and multimedia content. Little is presently known, however, about how people would use such systems to accomplish real tasks. In such circumstances, designers naturally rely on their own judgment to decide how component capabilities should be optimized and how those components should be integrated. Once that's been done, the next step is to put the resulting system in the hands of users in order to learn what they do with it. In this talk, I will describe what we have learned so far from such a process. I'll start with some background on user-centered evaluation for cross-language information retrieval at the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). I will then introduce Rosetta, an integrated system that supports search and display of live and archived news feeds in four languages for users who know only English and I'll explain how we have used a formative evaluation process to co-evolve both the design of the system and of the ways in which it can be used. I'll conclude the talk with a few design ideas that build on what we have learned to date.