Serials Solutions, a US-based provider of tools and services for libraries and a business unit of ProQuest LLC, has announced that it has enhanced its Japanese search functionality in the Serials Solutions Summon web-scale discovery service. The service currently enables sophisticated search features in Dutch, French and Japanese, and will be adding additional languages in the near future.
The Summon service has always supported UTF-8 encoding compliance for its foreign language search requirements. However, the complexities of the Japanese language in Unicode present challenges in delivering the most accurate search results. A host of sophisticated Japanese-language search features are now available through the Summon service. These include support for written language variations, tokenised and lemmatised search, and improved relevancy ranking.
In languages such as Japanese where there are several different writing variations - in this case, Hiragana, Kanji and Katakana - the Summon service recognises and returns relevant results regardless of how they are written. This means that researchers no longer need to search for information in all three writing styles, but rather will get all the results with one fast and easy search.
The Summon service now includes a state-of-the-art morphological analyser that is coupled with a Japanese dictionary to improve the overall search quality in the Japanese language. With tokenised search, there is no need to maintain a manually created exception list for handling string matches. The service also allows users to enter alternate forms of Japanese verbs, adjectives and auxiliary verbs into the search box, and returns results for all relevant inflected forms of the word, improving the discoverability of more content.
Additionally, the Summon service boosts the relevancy score for verbatim search term matches. This is especially important in character-based languages such as Japanese where the same character can carry multiple meanings depending on context. Researchers can be assured that there is no need to scroll through numerous pages of results to ensure they've reviewed all word-for-word matches.
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