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Multi-lingual web sites

More and more often, organizations need to provide their information in several languages. Many web sites offer visitors a choice of which language to use in viewing the contents of the web site.

The management of such a web site raises a number of issues. This paper reports on the experience from the actual development of such a web site.

The Web4Health web site

The web site developed has the name Web4Health, at the address http://web4health.info/. When this is written (September 2006), it contains about 900 informational texts for laymen in the area of mental health.

Most of the content is available in German, English and Swedish, some of it also in Finnish, Greek and Italian. In the month of March 2006 the web site had more than 500 000 visitors who viewed more than 1 400 000 pages.

The content of the web site was developed by medical experts in Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden. Each medical expert provided texts in their native language and/or English, and also translated the informational pages from other languages (mostly English) to their native language.

Most of the content is the same in all languages, but each medical partner was free to decide what to include and also could modify the text to suit the needs of each language region when translation to his/her language, and was also free to add additional pages only available in a specific language.

Content-management system

To manage the development and translation of the content, a multi-lingual content management system was developed for this project. Content management systems [11] are software systems specifically designed to handle large sets of documents, such as web sites with many pages [2].

According to [9], there are more than 225 software vendors supplying content management systems, even though this is a very new market, which has only existed for a few years, but our system has special features, described in this paper, not available in most other such systems (A system which has some such features is described in [10]). This paper describes the main principles of our content management system.

It will explain the advantages of the system design, but also discuss drawbacks and how an ideal multi-lingual content management system should work. It also describes some features which we now understand that we should have implemented, but which are not ready yet.

Natural-language question-answering system

The natural-language question-answering system (QuickAsk) [8], [3], [4] used in the web site is based on templates. For each answer, one or more templates are developed, which will match many different variations of questions, for which this answer is suitable.

This system requires that one or more such templates is constructed for each answer. During usage, the questions asked by actual users are logged, and these log files are used to check if the system produces suitable answers – when not, either the templates may need to be revised or a new informational text written.

The total time spent on producing a good template for each answer is 15–60 minutes, including time spent on testing the templates and on revising them based on usage logs. Step-wise refinement of this, by investigating logs of actual user questions, and adjusting the templates to new variants of the questions, is very important.

A problem is that this work, done for one language, will not convey its results for other languages. Tools to overcome this problem are discussed later in this paper.

An alternative would be to use traditional so-called free-text search tools, which automatically match questions to words in the answers. The advantage with the system we used is that it more often will find the best answer to a question, and that the search response will contain less unsuitable answers (in information retrieval terminology, our system will give higher recall and precision than free-text search tools).

The advantage with free-text search tools, of course, is that the manual work of producing the templates is not needed. Two master's students at DSV [12] have compared QuickAsk with using Google with site-restriction.

The test was done with 50 randomly selected actual questions from the log files of questions asked to the system. They found that the natural-language question-answering system found a good answer to 90 % of all questions, compared to only 68 % for Google.

Traditional so-called free text search systems were usually less good than Google, except for SiteSeeker, which was slightly better than Google (72 %) but still not at all as good as the natural-language question-answering system QuickAsk. SiteSeeker achieves better results than Google by understanding misspellings and Swedish-language conjugations better than Google.

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