Searching for Language Resources on the Web: User Behaviour in the Open Language Archives Community
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006)
Abstract
While much effort is expended in the curation of language resources, such investment is largely irrelevant if users cannot locate resourcesof interest. The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) was established to define standards for the description of language resources and providecore infrastructure for a virtual digital library, thus addressing the resource discovery issue. In this paper we consider naturalistic user search behaviour in the Open Language Archives Community. Specifically, we have collected the query logs from the OLAC Search Engine over a 2 year period, collecting in excess of 1.2 million queries, in over 450K user search sessions. Subsequently we have mined these to discover user search patterns of various types, all pertaining to the discovery of language resources.A number of interesting observations can be made based on this analysis, in this paper we report on a range of properties and behaviours based on empirical evidence.