A Comparative User Study of Interactive Multilingual Search Interfaces

While the number of polyglot Web users across the globe has increased dramatically, little human-centered research has been conducted to better understand and support multilingual user abilities and preferences. In particular, in the fields of cross-language and multilingual search, the majority of research has focused primarily on improving retrieval and translation accuracy, while paying comparably less attention to multilingual user interaction aspects. By contrast, this paper specifically focuses on multilingual search user interface preferences and behaviors, through a lab-based user study involving 25 participants interacting with a set of four different interactive multilingual search user interfaces. User preference results confirm that multilingual search users generally have strong preferences towards interfaces that provide clear language separation, and that the traditional approach of interleaving results, as typically used in prior research, is least preferred. In addition, an analysis of user interaction behaviors shows that multilingual users make significant use of each of their languages, and that there are several interaction behavior differences depending on interface and task type.