Which Log for which Information?
Gathering Multilinguality Data from Different
Log File Types
Maria Gäde, Vivien Petras, and Juliane Stiller
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
CLEF 2010
Padova, 21 September 2010
Premise
Assume you are building a multilingual digital library and could
log every user action with particular consideration for
multilingual activities.
Which questions could one ask?
(Which questions cannot be answered by logging?)
Outline:
• Europeana
• Log file types
• Logging multilingual information
• Europeana ClickStreamLogger
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Europeana
• 1,000+ content
providers
• Portal + APIs
• Services
September 2010:
• 7.8 mio. images
“A digital library that is a single, direct
and multilingual access point to the
European cultural heritage.”
• 4.6 mio. texts
• 127,000 videos
• 68,000 sounds
European Parliament, 27 September 2007
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Multilingual Europeana
• Interface
• Search
• Browse
• Results
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Multilingual Europeana
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Log File Types
Example Apache web server log
123.123.123.123 - - [11/Mar/2010:09:42:06 +0100]
"GET /cache/image/?uri=http://images.scran.ac.uk/rb/images/
thumb/0098/00980252.jpg&size=BRIEF_DOC&type=IMAGE
HTTP/1.0" 200 2843 "http://www.europeana.eu/portal/briefdoc.html?start=1&view=table&query=italy"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; it; rv:1.9.2)
Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"
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Log File Types
Example Google Analytics
Map overlay (IP address)
Languages (system language)
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Log File Types – Missing Information
• Web server log (Apache)
•
•
•
•
Interface language missing
Certain actions cannot be distinguished (browse = search)
Ajax / Flash actions (saved searches, tags, filter)
Reconstruct sessions
• Search engine log (Solr)
• Only queries
• Google Analytics
• Queries missing
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Logging Multilingual Information
Stages of the interaction:
• Approaching the system / background information
• Launching queries / browsing
• Viewing results
• Interacting with the results (filter, save, tag, repeat)
• User background
• Interface language
• Query language
• Query type
• Query content
• Query translation
• Search results
• Result set views
• Result translation
• Query reformulation
• User-generated content
• Saved searches / docs
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Logging Multilingual Information - Background
• User background information
• Country of access, system language, referrer site
• Interface language
• Change  stronger intervention
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Logging Multilingual Information - Query
• Query language
• Query processing
• Adapting languages to system
• Query type
• Simple, advanced, fielded (e.g. language restriction)
• Pre-selected categories for browsing
• Query content
• Named entities, dates, numbers (language ambiguous)
• Query translation
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Logging Multilingual Information - Results
• Search results
• Document languages
• Result set views
• Detailed view, external click stronger intervention
• Result translation
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Logging Multilingual Information – User Activities
• Query reformulation / refinement
• Language switch
• Filtering (language), related-item search
• User-generated content
• Language of tags
• Language of documents being tagged
• Saved searches / documents
• ???
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Europeana ClickStreamLogger
• Interface language
• state + change for every activity
• Search
• Result numbers, distribution of results by language / country
• Filtering and related searches
• Browse
• Browsing activities + starting points
• Navigation
• Move outside Europeana
• Ajax
• Save / remove searches / tags
• User management
• Account creation etc.
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What happens now…
• Soft roll-outs of new releases change site 
• Analysis of log data
• Interpretation
• Re-iteration of “useful information” categories
• Re-design user interaction?
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www.europeana.eu
www.europeanaconnect.eu
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