Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, has further advanced its multilingual support by introducing two new German-Language search enhancements — an improved umlaut search and increased support for variants. These new features are expected to enhance the search experience for German-language users in EBSCOhost and EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS).
The enhanced umlaut search allows searches with a word that contains the umlauted vowel (ä, ö, ü) and retrieves the same word spelled with the digraph 'vowel + e' (ae, oe, ue), and vice versa. Another advantage is that when data in records is entered inconsistently, sometimes using an umlauted vowel and sometimes using the digraph 'vowel + e', the search results will now include both, regardless of which way the query was entered.
EBSCO is also providing more support for variants enabling users to easily find what they are looking for. By covering a wide range of variations of the same word, search results will retrieve singular and plural forms in nouns and adjectives, variations of personal names, new spellings introduced as part of the 1996 Spelling Reform and other common spelling variations. Similar terms such as Großbritannien/England and synonyms of a search term (if the 'Apply related words' option is selected) will also be represented in the result list.
Expanding multilanguage search to offer improved search results is an ongoing mission for EBSCO. Earlier this year, the company announced the expansion of multilanguage searching in many of its resources to provide improved language-specific searching for more than 40 of the most common languages in EBSCOhost resources - a number that will continue to expand.
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