Rowena Li - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Rowena Li

Research paper thumbnail of Information needs and information seeking behavior in an academic virtual reference environment: a quantitative and qualitative study

Rowena Li, a school media specialist at Bayside High School in New York, is a Ph.D. student in in... more Rowena Li, a school media specialist at Bayside High School in New York, is a Ph.D. student in information science at the University of North Texas. She received her Master Degree of Library and Information Science from Queens College, CUNY, in 1997. She has worked in her current position for more than four years. Prior to that, she worked as a senior reference librarian at Queens Borough Public Library in New York, a prospect researcher at Queens College Foundation, and a lecturer at Nankai University in China. Her research interests focus upon cross-lingual information retrieval and cultural dimensions of documentations and website designs.This study investigates patrons' information seeking behavior and information needs demonstrated in the virtual reference environment, by examining the usage patterns and service effectiveness of virtual reference services in a large academic library. Both live chat and e-mail reference questions are analyzed quantitatively by mapping peak u...

Research paper thumbnail of Answering, English-Chinese Question Answering, and

This paper describes our participation in the NTCIR-5 CLQA task. Three runs were officially submi... more This paper describes our participation in the NTCIR-5 CLQA task. Three runs were officially submitted for three subtasks: Chinese Question

Research paper thumbnail of Cognitive and Psychological Factors in Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Advances in Library and Information Science, 2019

While a lot of research has focused on the effectiveness of system functionality, few studies hav... more While a lot of research has focused on the effectiveness of system functionality, few studies have examined information needs and social aspects related to cross-language information retrieval. This chapter aims to speculate the human and social aspects of cross-language information retrieval. It explores CLIR users' unique social and cultural contexts, their psychological and cognitive structures, and their distinctive relevance judgment. It examines in depth the barriers embedded in cultural, linguistic, and cognitive dimensions, which might hinder further advancement in cross-language information retrieval.

Research paper thumbnail of Human and Social Aspects of Information Seeking in Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Third Edition

With the rapid growth of computer and communication technology, a global interconnected informati... more With the rapid growth of computer and communication technology, a global interconnected information infrastructure is quickly constructing through the Internet. As the information is able to travel beyond geographical and spatial borders via the Internet, and more and more people around the world have gained access to global networks, the language boundaries have to be crossed in order to make the global communication possible. Statistics shows that 73.2% of Internet users are non-English speakers (MiniWats Marketing Group, 2012). However, English is still the leading language in global communication environment. English language dominates 55.5% of the websites (W3Techs.com, 2013). As the Internet has become one of the major communication mechanisms for information storage, retrieval, and dissemination, users need the ability to locate and retrieve information wherever, whenever and in whatever the language it has been stored. However, most of the search engines currently available can only provide monolingual information retrieval, which means that the retrieval can only be conducted in the same language as the query language. Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) has become increasingly important to facilitate the effectiveness of information exchange among different languages. As a result, the study and development of tools and technology of crosslanguage information retrieval have gained greater attention over the past decade. While a lot of research has focused on the effectiveness of system functionality, few studies have examined information needs and social aspects related to cross-language information retrieval. This article aims to speculate the human and social aspects of cross-language information retrieval. It explores CLIR users’ unique social and cultural contexts, their psychological and cognitive structures, and their distinctive relevance judgment. It examines in depth the barriers embedded in cultural, linguistic, and cognitive dimensions, which might hinder further advancement in cross-language information retrieval.

Research paper thumbnail of Traditional to Hybrid

Technological Innovation and Instructional Design

Drawn from first-hand teaching and learning experiences, this chapter seeks to explore social med... more Drawn from first-hand teaching and learning experiences, this chapter seeks to explore social media tools and their unique features in adapting traditional face-to-face courses to the hybrid learning environment. It examines the transformed roles of instructors and students, as well as their changing pedagogical, social, and psychological needs. It also demonstrates how social media can be used to meet the challenges of both hybrid and online instruction in higher education. This chapter provides faculty, administrators, and practitioners a better understanding of the roles of the instructors and students in a hybrid setting and also offers guidance to instructors on how to involve social media tools in a hybrid learning environment to enhance students’ learning experiences.

Research paper thumbnail of Measuring Democracy on Web Interface Design

Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Third Edition

Research paper thumbnail of The influence of geospatial factors on democracy: Its representation on web interface design

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2013

Democracy is represented on web interface design (Li, 2010). Wittfogel's (1957) Eastern autoc... more Democracy is represented on web interface design (Li, 2010). Wittfogel's (1957) Eastern autocracy states that 2 environmental dimensions, rainfall and sea border, influence the origin of democracy. This study examined Wittfogel's Eastern autocracy theory through statistical analysis of average annual precipitation, land boundaries, latitudes, and annual temperature of 196 countries and territories with their freedom levels defined by Freedom House, to find out the correlations between these geospatial factors and democracy. In addition, this study extended its investigation to web interface design by examining democracy represented on college/university websites in correlations with these geospatial factors. A total of 130 college/university websites selected from 65 countries were coded and examined systematically in linear and multiple regression analyses. This study concluded that democracy correlates positively with annual precipitation and latitude, but negatively with land boundaries and annual temperature. Furthermore, this study indicated that these 4 geospatial variables associate with democracy represented on web interface design, although the associations are not statistically significant. This study also suggested that it is more accurate to predict democracy if the 4 geospatial factors are considered together as dependent variables. By examining Wittfogel's theory of hydraulic civilization on web interface design, this study not only extended its sociological perspective to the information science arena, but also provided a better understanding of the functionality of the Internet in information dissemination and its cultural and sociological aspects.

Research paper thumbnail of The representation of national political freedom on Web interface design: The indicators

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2009

Li, Rowena Liu-ping, The representation of national political freedom on web interface design: A ... more Li, Rowena Liu-ping, The representation of national political freedom on web interface design: A comparison of government-based and business-oriented websites. Doctor of Philosophy (Information Science), December 2008, 154 pp., 9 tables, 9 illustrations, references, 75 titles. The purpose of this study is to explore the representation of national political freedom on web interface design by using power distance, one of the culture dimensions identified by Geert Hofstede, as a measurement. This study also aims to determine if there are any differences between government-based websites and business-oriented websites in representing national political freedom. A pilot study was conducted to validate ten power distance indicators identified from previous research on cultural dimensions with the intent of establishing a measurement for determining a country's national political freedom on web content and interface design. The result showed that six out of ten proposed indicators are valid power distance indicators. The seventh indicator, symmetric layout, demonstrated that its Web representation correlates with national political freedom level. Consequently, the principal research applied these seven indicators in coding 312 websites selected from 39 countries and analyzed national political freedom represented on these websites with content analysis method. The result of two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that large differences exist in web interface design, which in turn reflects the aforementioned national political freedom. The research showed that the mean effect of freedom level between free-country group, partly-free-country group and not-free-country group was statistically significant (p = .003). So was the mean effect of website type between government-based and business-oriented websites (p = .000). Furthermore, the interaction between the freedom level and website type was also significant (p = .041). Therefore, we conclude that web interface design represents a country's political freedom and governmentbased websites embody more of a nation's authority and supremacy than businessoriented websites do. It is expected that this study furthers our exploration in culture dimensions on web interface design and advances our knowledge in sociological and cultural studies of the web.

Research paper thumbnail of Virtual Reference in an Academic Environment: Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Users’ Information Needs

Research paper thumbnail of Chinese QA and CLQA: NTCIR-5 QA experiments at UNT

This paper describes our participation in the NTCIR-5 CLQA task. Three runs were officially submi... more This paper describes our participation in the NTCIR-5 CLQA task. Three runs were officially submitted for three subtasks: Chinese Question Answering, English-Chinese Question Answering, and Chinese-English Question Answering. We expanded our TREC experimental QA system EagleQA this year to include Chinese QA and Cross-Language QA capabilities. Various information retrieval and natural language processing tools were incorporated with our home-built programs such as Answer Type Identification, Sentence Extraction, and Answer Finding to find answers to the test questions. Future development will focus on investigating effective question translation and answer finding solutions.

Research paper thumbnail of Chinese information retrieval using Lemur: NTCIR-5 CIR experiments at UNT

This paper describes our participation in NTCIR-5 Chinese Information Retrieval (IR) evaluation. ... more This paper describes our participation in NTCIR-5 Chinese Information Retrieval (IR) evaluation. The main purpose is to evaluate Lemur, a freely available information retrieval toolkit. Our results showed that Lemur could provide above average performance on most of the runs. We also compared manual queries vs. automatic queries for Chinese IR. The results show that manually generated queries did not have much effect on IR performance. More analysis will be carried out to discover causes behind hard topics and ways to improve the overall retrieval performance.

Research paper thumbnail of Determine Democracy in Web Design

Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Fourth Edition, 2018

This chapter serves as an introduction to apply seven indicators in examining democracy on web in... more This chapter serves as an introduction to apply seven indicators in examining democracy on web interface design. It introduces a new measuring instrument to assist in determining a nation's democracy level, so that democracy can be measured not only by traditional methods (surveys, case studies, questionnaires, interviews, and observations), but also through the study of web interface design. As a result, it extends cultural and political studies into the fields of human-computer interaction and user interface design.

Research paper thumbnail of Information needs and information seeking behavior in an academic virtual reference environment: a quantitative and qualitative study

Rowena Li, a school media specialist at Bayside High School in New York, is a Ph.D. student in in... more Rowena Li, a school media specialist at Bayside High School in New York, is a Ph.D. student in information science at the University of North Texas. She received her Master Degree of Library and Information Science from Queens College, CUNY, in 1997. She has worked in her current position for more than four years. Prior to that, she worked as a senior reference librarian at Queens Borough Public Library in New York, a prospect researcher at Queens College Foundation, and a lecturer at Nankai University in China. Her research interests focus upon cross-lingual information retrieval and cultural dimensions of documentations and website designs.This study investigates patrons' information seeking behavior and information needs demonstrated in the virtual reference environment, by examining the usage patterns and service effectiveness of virtual reference services in a large academic library. Both live chat and e-mail reference questions are analyzed quantitatively by mapping peak u...

Research paper thumbnail of Answering, English-Chinese Question Answering, and

This paper describes our participation in the NTCIR-5 CLQA task. Three runs were officially submi... more This paper describes our participation in the NTCIR-5 CLQA task. Three runs were officially submitted for three subtasks: Chinese Question

Research paper thumbnail of Cognitive and Psychological Factors in Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Advances in Library and Information Science, 2019

While a lot of research has focused on the effectiveness of system functionality, few studies hav... more While a lot of research has focused on the effectiveness of system functionality, few studies have examined information needs and social aspects related to cross-language information retrieval. This chapter aims to speculate the human and social aspects of cross-language information retrieval. It explores CLIR users' unique social and cultural contexts, their psychological and cognitive structures, and their distinctive relevance judgment. It examines in depth the barriers embedded in cultural, linguistic, and cognitive dimensions, which might hinder further advancement in cross-language information retrieval.

Research paper thumbnail of Human and Social Aspects of Information Seeking in Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Third Edition

With the rapid growth of computer and communication technology, a global interconnected informati... more With the rapid growth of computer and communication technology, a global interconnected information infrastructure is quickly constructing through the Internet. As the information is able to travel beyond geographical and spatial borders via the Internet, and more and more people around the world have gained access to global networks, the language boundaries have to be crossed in order to make the global communication possible. Statistics shows that 73.2% of Internet users are non-English speakers (MiniWats Marketing Group, 2012). However, English is still the leading language in global communication environment. English language dominates 55.5% of the websites (W3Techs.com, 2013). As the Internet has become one of the major communication mechanisms for information storage, retrieval, and dissemination, users need the ability to locate and retrieve information wherever, whenever and in whatever the language it has been stored. However, most of the search engines currently available can only provide monolingual information retrieval, which means that the retrieval can only be conducted in the same language as the query language. Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) has become increasingly important to facilitate the effectiveness of information exchange among different languages. As a result, the study and development of tools and technology of crosslanguage information retrieval have gained greater attention over the past decade. While a lot of research has focused on the effectiveness of system functionality, few studies have examined information needs and social aspects related to cross-language information retrieval. This article aims to speculate the human and social aspects of cross-language information retrieval. It explores CLIR users’ unique social and cultural contexts, their psychological and cognitive structures, and their distinctive relevance judgment. It examines in depth the barriers embedded in cultural, linguistic, and cognitive dimensions, which might hinder further advancement in cross-language information retrieval.

Research paper thumbnail of Traditional to Hybrid

Technological Innovation and Instructional Design

Drawn from first-hand teaching and learning experiences, this chapter seeks to explore social med... more Drawn from first-hand teaching and learning experiences, this chapter seeks to explore social media tools and their unique features in adapting traditional face-to-face courses to the hybrid learning environment. It examines the transformed roles of instructors and students, as well as their changing pedagogical, social, and psychological needs. It also demonstrates how social media can be used to meet the challenges of both hybrid and online instruction in higher education. This chapter provides faculty, administrators, and practitioners a better understanding of the roles of the instructors and students in a hybrid setting and also offers guidance to instructors on how to involve social media tools in a hybrid learning environment to enhance students’ learning experiences.

Research paper thumbnail of Measuring Democracy on Web Interface Design

Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Third Edition

Research paper thumbnail of The influence of geospatial factors on democracy: Its representation on web interface design

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2013

Democracy is represented on web interface design (Li, 2010). Wittfogel's (1957) Eastern autoc... more Democracy is represented on web interface design (Li, 2010). Wittfogel's (1957) Eastern autocracy states that 2 environmental dimensions, rainfall and sea border, influence the origin of democracy. This study examined Wittfogel's Eastern autocracy theory through statistical analysis of average annual precipitation, land boundaries, latitudes, and annual temperature of 196 countries and territories with their freedom levels defined by Freedom House, to find out the correlations between these geospatial factors and democracy. In addition, this study extended its investigation to web interface design by examining democracy represented on college/university websites in correlations with these geospatial factors. A total of 130 college/university websites selected from 65 countries were coded and examined systematically in linear and multiple regression analyses. This study concluded that democracy correlates positively with annual precipitation and latitude, but negatively with land boundaries and annual temperature. Furthermore, this study indicated that these 4 geospatial variables associate with democracy represented on web interface design, although the associations are not statistically significant. This study also suggested that it is more accurate to predict democracy if the 4 geospatial factors are considered together as dependent variables. By examining Wittfogel's theory of hydraulic civilization on web interface design, this study not only extended its sociological perspective to the information science arena, but also provided a better understanding of the functionality of the Internet in information dissemination and its cultural and sociological aspects.

Research paper thumbnail of The representation of national political freedom on Web interface design: The indicators

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2009

Li, Rowena Liu-ping, The representation of national political freedom on web interface design: A ... more Li, Rowena Liu-ping, The representation of national political freedom on web interface design: A comparison of government-based and business-oriented websites. Doctor of Philosophy (Information Science), December 2008, 154 pp., 9 tables, 9 illustrations, references, 75 titles. The purpose of this study is to explore the representation of national political freedom on web interface design by using power distance, one of the culture dimensions identified by Geert Hofstede, as a measurement. This study also aims to determine if there are any differences between government-based websites and business-oriented websites in representing national political freedom. A pilot study was conducted to validate ten power distance indicators identified from previous research on cultural dimensions with the intent of establishing a measurement for determining a country's national political freedom on web content and interface design. The result showed that six out of ten proposed indicators are valid power distance indicators. The seventh indicator, symmetric layout, demonstrated that its Web representation correlates with national political freedom level. Consequently, the principal research applied these seven indicators in coding 312 websites selected from 39 countries and analyzed national political freedom represented on these websites with content analysis method. The result of two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that large differences exist in web interface design, which in turn reflects the aforementioned national political freedom. The research showed that the mean effect of freedom level between free-country group, partly-free-country group and not-free-country group was statistically significant (p = .003). So was the mean effect of website type between government-based and business-oriented websites (p = .000). Furthermore, the interaction between the freedom level and website type was also significant (p = .041). Therefore, we conclude that web interface design represents a country's political freedom and governmentbased websites embody more of a nation's authority and supremacy than businessoriented websites do. It is expected that this study furthers our exploration in culture dimensions on web interface design and advances our knowledge in sociological and cultural studies of the web.

Research paper thumbnail of Virtual Reference in an Academic Environment: Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Users’ Information Needs

Research paper thumbnail of Chinese QA and CLQA: NTCIR-5 QA experiments at UNT

This paper describes our participation in the NTCIR-5 CLQA task. Three runs were officially submi... more This paper describes our participation in the NTCIR-5 CLQA task. Three runs were officially submitted for three subtasks: Chinese Question Answering, English-Chinese Question Answering, and Chinese-English Question Answering. We expanded our TREC experimental QA system EagleQA this year to include Chinese QA and Cross-Language QA capabilities. Various information retrieval and natural language processing tools were incorporated with our home-built programs such as Answer Type Identification, Sentence Extraction, and Answer Finding to find answers to the test questions. Future development will focus on investigating effective question translation and answer finding solutions.

Research paper thumbnail of Chinese information retrieval using Lemur: NTCIR-5 CIR experiments at UNT

This paper describes our participation in NTCIR-5 Chinese Information Retrieval (IR) evaluation. ... more This paper describes our participation in NTCIR-5 Chinese Information Retrieval (IR) evaluation. The main purpose is to evaluate Lemur, a freely available information retrieval toolkit. Our results showed that Lemur could provide above average performance on most of the runs. We also compared manual queries vs. automatic queries for Chinese IR. The results show that manually generated queries did not have much effect on IR performance. More analysis will be carried out to discover causes behind hard topics and ways to improve the overall retrieval performance.

Research paper thumbnail of Determine Democracy in Web Design

Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Fourth Edition, 2018

This chapter serves as an introduction to apply seven indicators in examining democracy on web in... more This chapter serves as an introduction to apply seven indicators in examining democracy on web interface design. It introduces a new measuring instrument to assist in determining a nation's democracy level, so that democracy can be measured not only by traditional methods (surveys, case studies, questionnaires, interviews, and observations), but also through the study of web interface design. As a result, it extends cultural and political studies into the fields of human-computer interaction and user interface design.