Hi, On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 3:50 AM, Sergiu Dumitriu <[email protected]> wrote:
On 06/28/2012 04:01 AM, savitha sundaramurthy wrote:
Hi all,
While trying to retrieve the search results had the following doubts.
*Problem: * * * * *Say XWiki has three languages English, Spanish, French. I give a query in English(some *proper noun*) , should it return the documents pertaining only to english or it can return documents pertaining to other languages too?
If the scenario is such that it retrieves the documents irrespective of languages, I have few ideas to deal with it.
1) We can get the documents, merge them, add the scores and give it a high rating. This would help to avoid super results such as a display of a different match in each language to some extent. 2) Make it a part of facet search , where search results could be differentiated base don language.
Would be really helpful to gain your suggestions.
XWiki is pretty unique in the way it handles multilingualism, so I can't think of an example to follow.
Also, how a multilingual XWiki is going to be used depends a lot on the particular organization using it, so one generic solution might not make everybody happy, so multiple solutions to chose from (in the administration) might be the proper way to go.
Here's how I would like things:
When searching for something, let's say "scorpions", and my current language is English, I see first documents that are written in English:
" Search results for "Scorpions":
[100%] Scorpion [ 95%] The Scorpions [ 50%] Scorpio "
After that, we also search for a few top hits in all the other languages except English, and if we have strong hits (let's say score above 75%), we display something like:
" You might be interested in these results in other languages:
[ 98%] [de] The Scoripions [ 90%] [fr] Scorpiones [ 89%] [ro] Scorpion
[[Search for "Scorpions" in every language]] "
Now, I'm not sure when exactly to display this: - every time when there are hits with a score above a threshold - only when there are hits with scores higher than the best scoring result in the current language - only when there are few results in the current language (less than 5)
IMO we really need an advanced search. From there you could filter the spaces, if the results you want are attachments, if the pages were created in a certain period, how many results you want to have, etc. Having a language filter in this advanced search makes very much sense. Although when I first read the topic I was thinking about it from a developer point of view and tried to squeeze all the results together in a view, then I thought why would someone want to see results in different languages? For example: - I use the google.com site because I don't want to receive pages written in romanian; - if I would want to have also romanian pages I can go advanced setting and select also Romanian for the search results; - now I'm pretty sure I don't want to see pages in german or latvian or any other language (although in the google example I could easily translate them if they would have great quality content). Seeing that some pages have what I want is ok, but I won't be able to understand that content (except using a translation service) if those pages are in other languages than my selected language. The merging of scores for a document that has multiple translations is especially confusing, because if the interface doesn't mention in what language version of the page it has found my query, I will open the english version for example and I won't find anything there for my use. What I would propose, besides advanced filters, is: - by default show results only from current user language; - allow to search and display for multiple/all languages only if you are using the advanced search; (display the results with the language mark [en, de, etc.], sort by relevance); - suggest results from other languages versions (like sergiu mentioned) if there are no results for the current language + hint for advanced search. (This case may be when the page I look for haven't been yet translated and at least I should see that the wiki contains results on my query, but not what I needed). IMO multiple translations of the same page should have similar (equal) scores. Seeing in my search results that the french version of the page I need has a higher score than the english version I need doesn't give me any insight and I will still open the english one. Hope this helps, Caty
-- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/
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