Serials Solutions Adds Sophisticated Japanese Language Search to the Summon™ Discovery Service

New Search Capabilities Tune Relevancy Ranking for Improved Discovery of Japanese Materials

May 23, 2011 – SEATTLE, Wash. - Serials Solutions®, a business unit of ProQuest® LLC, announced today it has enhanced its Japanese search functionality in the Serials Solutions Summon™ web-scale discovery service by enabling a host of sophisticated features such as support for written language variations, tokenized and lemmatized search, and improved relevancy ranking.

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. With the Summon™ service’s new Japanese search functionality, which incorporates sophisticated natural language processing techniques for text analysis, Serials Solutions is going above and beyond UTF-8 standards to truly make the discovery experience comprehensive and easy-to-use.

“We take search very seriously at Serials Solutions and strive to ensure researchers are able to search in their native language with the same ease and support that our English-language customers enjoy,” said Andrea Michalek, director of technology, discovery services with Serials Solutions. “We have always supported match for match search in Japanese, but by enabling a sophisticated Japanese-language search, we are furthering our commitment to ensuring users of the Summon service receive all available and relevant search results, quickly and easily, regardless of language.”

The following sophisticated Japanese-language search features are now available through the Summon™ service:

• Tokenized Japanese Search - The Summon™ service now includes a state-of-the-art morphological analyzer that is coupled with a Japanese dictionary to improve the overall search quality in the Japanese language. With tokenized search, there is no need to maintain a manually created exception list for handling string matches.
• Support for Written Language Variations - In languages such as Japanese where there are several different writing variations—in this case, Hiragana, Kanji and Katakana—the Summon™ service recognizes 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.
• Lemmatized Search – The Summon™ service now 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.
• Improved Relevancy Ranking – 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.

Serials Solutions® Summon™ service currently enables sophisticated search features in Dutch, French and Japanese, and will be adding additional languages in the near future.

About Serials Solutions

Serials Solutions® is the global leader in essential discovery and e-resource management solutions which are powered by a comprehensive knowledgebase. Its popular suite of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions helps improve access to and use of collections, eases librarian workloads, and ultimately reduces operating costs. Solutions include: the world-class Summon™ web-scale discovery service, providing instant access to the full breadth of the library’s collection through a single search; the AquaBrowser® discovery layer, making navigation more accessible; 360, the only integrated e-resource access and management solution; KnowledgeWorks, the authoritative e-resource knowledgebase and foundation for Serials Solutions 360; and Ulrich’s™, the world’s most authoritative source of bibliographic and publisher information for serials and the most comprehensive source of print and electronic serials data available. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Serials Solutions is a member of the ProQuest® family of companies.

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