Assessing Multilinguality of Publicly Accessible Websites

Rinalds Vīksna, Inguna Skadiņa, Raivis Skadiņš, Andrejs Vasiļjevs, Roberts Rozis

Abstract
Although information on the Internet can be shared in many languages, the language presence on the World Wide Web is very disproportionate. The problem of multilingualism on the Web, in particular access, availability and quality of information in the world’s languages, has been the subject of UNESCO focus for several decades. Making European websites more multilingual is also one of the focal targets of the Connecting Europe Facility Automated Translation (CEF AT) digital service infrastructure. In order to monitor this goal, alongside other possible solutions, CEF AT needs a methodology and easy to use tool to assess the degree of multilingualism of a given website. In this paper we investigate methods and tools that automatically analyse the language diversity of the Web and propose indicators and methodology on how to measure the multilingualism of European websites. We also introduce a prototype tool based on open-source software that helps to assess multilingualism of the Web and can be independently run at set intervals. We also present initial results obtained with our tool that allows us to conclude that multilingualism on the Web is still a problem not only at the world level, but also at the European and regional level.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.227
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2108–2116
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.227
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rinalds Vīksna, Inguna Skadiņa, Raivis Skadiņš, Andrejs Vasiļjevs, and Roberts Rozis. 2022. Assessing Multilinguality of Publicly Accessible Websites. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2108–2116, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Assessing Multilinguality of Publicly Accessible Websites (Vīksna et al., LREC 2022)
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