Machine translation and author keywords: A viable search strategy for scholars with limited English proficiency?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Author keywords are valuable for indexing articles and for information retrieval (IR). Most scientific literature is published in English. Can machine translation (MT) help researchers with limited English proficiency to search for information? We used two MT systems (Google Translate, DeepL Translator) to translate into English 71 Spanish keywords and 43 French keywords from articles in the domain of Library and Information Science. We then used the English translations to search the Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) database. Half of the translated keywords returned relevant results. Of the half that did not, 34% were well translated but did not align with LISTA descriptors. Translation-related problems stemming from orthographic variation, synonymy, differing syntactic preferences, and semantic field coverage interfered with IR in just 16% of cases. Some of the MT errors are relatively “predictable” and if knowledge organization systems could be augmented to deal with them, then MT may prove even more useful for searching.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.016 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".