Microsoft Fast ESP with the Microsoft Bing Translator
September 27, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to a write up and a screenshot of the integrated translation utility in the new Fast ESP. The idea is to run a query and get results from documents in different languages. Click on an interesting document and get the translation. To my eye the layout of the screen looked a little Googley, but that’s because I look at the world through the two oohs in the Google logo. The write up is “Enterprise Search and Bing Services – Part 1: The Bing Translator” and you should read the story. Here’s the screenshot that caught my attention:
The article said:
In this example, not only is the user’s query translated and expanded to include other languages (French, German, and Chinese), but the user has the ability to translate the teasers or the entire document using the Bing Translator. The search results also include query highlighting for each of the multiple translations of the query. Finally, the user can use the slider bar (or the visual navigator) to favor documents written in certain languages. Any slider action causes the result set to update automatically. The relevance control behind this slider widget is actually a feature of FAST ESP, but it shows another way of surfacing cross-lingual search.
No information was provided about the computational burden the system adds to a Fast ESP system. Interesting, however. I prefer to see a translated version of the document’s title and snippet in the results list with an option to view the hit in its original language. The “old” Fast Search & Transfer operation had some linguistic professionals working Germany. I wonder if that group is now marginalized or if it has been shifted to other projects. Info about that linguistic group would be helpful. Use the comments section of this Web log to share if you are able.
Stephen Arnold, September 27, 2009
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