Discussion questions for March 19, 2009

"Global Linguistic Diversity for the Internet",
Communications of the ACM, Jan. 2005, pp. 27-28
plus a look at the unicode.org Website


1.  What alternatives are there to relying on Unicode
to express information in a foreign language?


2.  What advantages does the author give for providing more
alphabets in Unicode?  Do you find the arguments convincinig?
Can you think of other advantages?


3.  Is Unicode a panacea for saving less commonly used languages?


4.  What are some examples of scripts used in Unicode that
do not correspond to languages currently in use?

--

"Web Searching in a Multilingual World"
Communications of the ACM, May 2008, pp. 32-40

5.  What are the most common languages in use on the Internet?
Why did the author of this article focus on 3 languages in particular?


6.  What criticism does the author have for current search engines
that employ foreign languages?


7.  Experiment with some of the foreign Web portals mentioned in
the article.  How do they compare with English-based servers you
are more familar with?


8.  What recommendations does the author give for people who want to
provide access to vast amounts of information in a particular language?


9.  What sort of experiment is discussed in the article?  What
were the findings?