Smart Miner : a new framework for mining large scale web usage data In this paper , we propose a novel framework called Smart-Miner for web usage mining problem which uses link information for producing accurate user sessions and frequent navigation patterns . Unlike the simple session concepts in the time and navigation based approaches , where sessions are sequences of web pages requested from the server or viewed in the browser , Smart Miner sessions are set of paths traversed in the web graph that corresponds to users ' navigations among web pages . We have modeled session construction as a new graph problem and utilized a new algorithm , Smart-SRA , to solve this problem efficiently . For the pattern discovery phase , we have developed an efficient version of the Apriori-All technique which uses the structure of web graph to increase the performance . From the experiments that we have performed on both real and simulated data , we have observed that Smart-Miner produces at least 30 % more accurate web usage patterns than other approaches including previous session construction methods . We have also studied the effect of having the referrer information in the web server logs to show that different versions of Smart-SRA produce similar results . Our another contribution is that we have implemented distributed version of the Smart Miner framework by employing Map\/Reduce Paradigm . We conclude that we can efficiently process terabytes of web server logs belonging to multiple web sites by our scalable framework .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

graph mining
map/reduce
parallel data mining
web user modeling


HyperANF : approximating the neighborhood function of very large graphs on a budget The neighborhood function NG ( t ) of a graph G gives , for each t ∈ N , the number of pairs of nodes x , y such that y is reachable from x in less that t hops . The neighborhood function provides a wealth of information about the graph ( 10 ) ( e.g. , it easily allows one to compute its diameter ) , but it is very expensive to compute it exactly . Recently , the ANF algorithm ( 10 ) ( approximate neighborhood function ) has been proposed with the purpose of approximating NG ( t ) on large graphs . We describe a breakthrough improvement over ANF in terms of speed and scalability . Our algorithm , called HyperANF , uses the new HyperLogLog counters ( 5 ) and combines them efficiently through broadword programming ( 8 ) ; our implementation uses talk decomposition to exploit multi-core parallelism . With HyperANF , for the first time we can compute in a few hours the neighborhood function of graphs with billions of nodes with a small error and good confidence using a standard workstation . Then , we turn to the study of the distribution of the distances between reachable nodes ( that can be efficiently approximated by means of HyperANF ) , and discover the surprising fact that its index of dispersion provides a clear-cut characterisation of proper social networks vs. web graphs . We thus propose the spid ( Shortest-Paths Index of Dispersion ) of a graph as a new , informative statistics that is able to discriminate between the above two types of graphs . We believe this is the first proposal of a significant new non-local structural index for complex networks whose computation is highly scalable .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

effective diameter
neighbourhood function
probabilistic algorithms
probabilistic counters
shortest paths


Malicious interface design : exploiting the user In an ideal world , interface design is the art and science of helping users accomplish tasks in a timely , efficient , and pleasurable manner . This paper studies the inverse situation , the vast emergence of deliberately constructed malicious interfaces that violate design best practices in order to accomplish goals counter to those of the user . This has become a commonplace occurrence both on and off the desktop , particularly on the web . A primary objective of this paper is to formally define this problem , including construction of a taxonomy of malicious interface techniques and a preliminary analysis of their impact on users . Findings are presented that gauge the self-reported tolerance and expectation levels of users with regard to malicious interfaces as well as the effectiveness and ease of use of existing countermeasures . A second objective of this paper is to increase awareness , dialogue , and research in a domain that we consider largely unexplored but critical to future usability of the WWW . Our results were accomplished through significant compilation of malicious interface techniques based on review of thousands of web sites and by conducting three surveys . Ultimately , this paper concludes that malicious interfaces are a ubiquitous problem that demands intervention by the security and human computer interaction communities in order to reduce the negative impact on the global user population .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

adversarial interface design
design principles
evil interfaces
miscellaneous
web usability guidelines


Empirical comparison of algorithms for network community detection Detecting clusters or communities in large real-world graphs such as large social or information networks is a problem of considerable interest . In practice , one typically chooses an objective function that captures the intuition of a network cluster as set of nodes with better internal connectivity than external connectivity , and then one applies approximation algorithms or heuristics to extract sets of nodes that are related to the objective function and that `` look like '' good communities for the application of interest . In this paper , we explore a range of network community detection methods in order to compare them and to understand their relative performance and the systematic biases in the clusters they identify . We evaluate several common objective functions that are used to formalize the notion of a network community , and we examine several different classes of approximation algorithms that aim to optimize such objective functions . In addition , rather than simply fixing an objective and asking for an approximation to the best cluster of any size , we consider a size-resolved version of the optimization problem . Considering community quality as a function of its size provides a much finer lens with which to examine community detection algorithms , since objective functions and approximation algorithms often have non-obvious size-dependent behavior .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

community structure
conductance
flow-based methods
graph partitioning
spectral methods


Improving portlet interoperability through deep annotation Portlets ( i.e. multi-step , user-facing applications to be syndicated within a portal ) are currently supported by most portal frameworks . However , there is not yet a definitive answer to portlet interoperation whereby data flows smoothly from one portlet to a neighbouring one . Both data-based and API-based approaches exhibit some drawbacks in either the limitation of the sharing scope or the standardization effort required . We argue that these limitations can be overcome by using deep annotation techniques . By providing additional markup about the background services , deep annotation strives to interact with these underlying services rather than with the HTML surface that conveys the markup . In this way , the portlet producer can extend a portlet markup , a fragment , with data about the processes whose rendering this fragment supports . Then , the portlet consumer ( e.g. a portal ) can use deep annotation to map an output process in fragment A to an input process in fragment B. This mapping results in fragment B having its input form ( or other `` input '' widget ) filled up . We consider deep annotation as particularly valid for portlet interoperation due to the controlled and cooperative environment that characterizes the portal setting .

O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

data-flow
deep-annotation
event
portal ontology
portlet interoperability
reusable software
software architectures


A management and performance framework for semantic web servers The unification of Semantic Web query languages under the SPARQL standard and the development of commercial-quality implementations are encouraging industries to use semantic technologies for managing information . Current implementations , however , lack the performance monitoring and management services that the industry expects . In this paper , we present a performance and management framework interface to a generic SPARQL web server . We leverage existing standards for instrumentation to make the system ready-to-manage through existing monitoring applications , and we provide a performance framework which has the distinct feature of providing measurement results through the same SPARQL interface used to query data , eliminating the need for special interfaces .

O O O O O O B I O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Automatically filling form-based web interfaces with free text inputs On the web of today the most prevalent solution for users to interact with data-intensive applications is the use of form-based interfaces composed by several data input fields , such as text boxes , radio buttons , pull-down lists , check boxes , etc. . Although these interfaces are popular and effective , in many cases , free text interfaces are preferred over form-based ones . In this paper we discuss the proposal and the implementation of a novel IR-based method for using data rich free text to interact with form-based interfaces . Our solution takes a free text as input , extracts implicitly data values from it and fills appropriate fields using them . For this task , we rely on values of previous submissions for each field , which are freely obtained from the usage of form-based interfaces

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

data extraction
form filling
general
web applications


Ranking the web frontier The celebrated PageRank algorithm has proved to be a very effective paradigm for ranking results of web search algorithms . In this paper we refine this basic paradigm to take into account several evolving prominent features of the web , and propose several algorithmic innovations . First , we analyze features of the rapidly growing `` frontier '' of the web , namely the part of the web that crawlers are unable to cover for one reason or another . We analyze the effect of these pages and find it to be significant . We suggest ways to improve the quality of ranking by modeling the growing presence of `` link rot '' on the web as more sites and pages fall out of maintenance . Finally we suggest new methods of ranking that are motivated by the hierarchical structure of the web , are more efficient than PageRank , and may be more resistant to direct manipulation .

B O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O

hypertext
information search and retrieval


An experimental study of large-scale mobile social network Mobile social network is a typical social network where one or more individuals of similar interests or commonalities , conversing and connecting with one another using the mobile phone . Our works in this paper focus on the experimental study for this kind of social network with the support of large-scale real mobile call data . The main contributions can be summarized as three-fold : firstly , a large-scale real mobile phone call log of one city has been extracted from a mobile phone carrier in China to construct mobile social network ; secondly , common features of traditional social networks , such as power law distribution and small diameter etc , have been experimented , with which we confirm that the mobile social network is a typical scale-free network and has small-world phenomenon ; lastly , different from traditional analytical methods , important properties of the actors , such as gender and age , have been introduced into our experiments with some interesting findings about human behavior , for example , the middle-age people are more active than the young and old people , and the female is unusual more active than the male while in the old age .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

betweenness centrality
clustering coefficient
degree distribution
shortest path


Analysis of multimedia workloads with implications for internet streaming In this paper , we study the media workload collected from a large number of commercial Web sites hosted by a major ISP and that collected from a large group of home users connected to the Internet via a well-known cable company . Some of our key findings are : ( 1 ) Surprisingly , the majority of media contents are still delivered via downloading from Web servers . ( 2 ) A substantial percentage of media downloading connections are aborted before completion due to the long waiting time . ( 3 ) A hybrid approach , pseudo streaming , is used by clients to imitate real streaming . ( 4 ) The mismatch between the downloading rate and the client playback speed in pseudo streaming is common , which either causes frequent playback delays to the clients , or unnecessary traffic to the Internet . ( 5 ) Compared with streaming , downloading and pseudo streaming are neither bandwidth efficient nor performance effective . To address this problem , we propose the design of AutoStream , an innovative system that can provide additional previewing and streaming services automatically for media objects hosted on standard Web sites in server farms at the client 's will .

O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Beyond position bias : examining result attractiveness as a source of presentation bias in clickthrough data Leveraging clickthrough data has become a popular approach for evaluating and optimizing information retrieval systems . Although data is plentiful , one must take care when interpreting clicks , since user behavior can be affected by various sources of presentation bias . While the issue of position bias in clickthrough data has been the topic of much study , other presentation bias effects have received comparatively little attention . For instance , since users must decide whether to click on a result based on its summary ( e.g. , the title , URL and abstract ) , one might expect clicks to favor `` more attractive '' results . In this paper , we examine result summary attractiveness as a potential source of presentation bias . This study distinguishes itself from prior work by aiming to detect systematic biases in click behavior due to attractive summaries inflating perceived relevance . Our experiments conducted on the Google web search engine show substantial evidence of presentation bias in clicks towards results with more attractive titles .

O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O


Evaluating strategies for similarity search on the web Finding pages on the Web that are similar to a query page ( Related Pages ) is an important component of modern search engines . A variety of strategies have been proposed for answering Related Pages queries , but comparative evaluation by user studies is expensive , especially when large strategy spaces must be searched ( e.g. , when tuning parameters ) . We present a technique for automatically evaluating strategies using Web hierarchies , such as Open Directory , in place of user feedback . We apply this evaluation methodology to a mix of document representation strategies , including the use of text , anchor-text , and links . We discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches examined . Finally , we describe how to efficiently construct a similarity index out of our chosen strategies , and provide sample results from our index .

O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

open directory project
similarity search


Clarifying the fundamentals of HTTP The simplicity of HTTP was a major factor in the success of the Web . However , as both the protocol and its uses have evolved , HTTP has grown complex . This complexity results in numerous problems , including confused implementors , interoperability failures , difficulty in extending the protocol , and a long specification without much documented rationale . Many of the problems with HTTP can be traced to unfortunate choices about fundamental definitions and models . This paper analyzes the current ( HTTP\/1 .1 ) protocol design , showing how it fails in certain cases , and how to improve these fundamentals . Some problems with HTTP can be fixed simply by adopting new models and terminology , allowing us to think more clearly about implementations and extensions . Other problems require explicit ( but compatible ) protocol changes .

O O O O B O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Semantic similarity between search engine queries using temporal correlation We investigate the idea of finding semantically related search engine queries based on their temporal correlation ; in other words , we infer that two queries are related if their popularities behave similarly over time . To this end , we first define a new measure of the temporal correlation of two queries based on the correlation coefficient of their frequency functions . We then conduct extensive experiments using our measure on two massive query streams from the MSN search engine , revealing that this technique can discover a wide range of semantically similar queries . Finally , we develop a method of efficiently finding the highest correlated queries for a given input query using far less space and time than the naive approach , making real-time implementation possible .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

information search and retrieval
query stream analysis
search engines
semantic similarity among queries


PicASHOW : pictorial authority search by hyperlinks on the Web

hubs and authorities
hypertext/hypermedia
image hubs
image retrieval
link structure analysis


Analysis of topic dynamics in web search We report on a study of topic dynamics for pages visited by a sample of people using MSN Search . We examine the predictive accuracies of probabilistic models of topic transitions for individuals and groups of users . We explore temporal dynamics by comparing the accuracy of the models for predicting topic transitions at increasingly distant times in the future . Finally , we discuss directions for applying models of search topic dynamics .

O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

information storage and retrieval
topic analysis
topic transition
user modeling


Harnessing the wisdom of crowds : video event detection based on synchronous comments With the recent explosive growth of the number of videos on the Web , it becomes more important to facilitate users ' demand for locating their preferred event clips in the lengthy and voluminous programs . Although there has been a great deal of study on generic event detection in recent years , the performance of existing approaches is still far from satisfactory . In this paper , we propose an integrated framework for general event detection . The key idea is that we utilize the synchronous comments to segment the video into clips with semantic text analysis , while taking into account the relationship between the users who write the comments . By borrowing the power of `` the wisdom of crowds '' , we experimentally demonstrate that our approach can effectively detect video events .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

information extraction
information search and retrieval
tag analysis
video search


Adaptive faceted browser for navigation in open information spaces Open information spaces have several unique characteristics such as their changeability , large size , complexity and diverse user base . These result in novel challenges during user navigation , information retrieval and data visualization in open information spaces . We propose a method of navigation in open information spaces based on an enhanced faceted browser with support for dynamic facet generation and adaptation based on user characteristics .

B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

information search and retrieval
open information space


Time-based contextualized-news browser ( t-cnb ) We propose a new way of browsing contextualized-news articles . Our prototype browser system is called a Time-based Contextualized-News Browser ( T-CNB ) . The T-CNB concurrently and automatically presents a series of related pages for one news source while browsing the user-specified page . It extracts the past related pages from a user-specified news articles on the web . The related pages outline the progress of user-specified news articles . We call the related pages ` contextual pages ' . Using the T-CNB , a user only needs to specify one news article on the web . The user then automatically receives past related news articles , which provide a wider understanding of the topic . The T-CNB automatically generates and presents contextualized news articles .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O


Using Google distance to weight approximate ontology matches Discovering mappings between concept hierarchies is widely regarded as one of the hardest and most urgent problems facing the Semantic Web . The problem is even harder in domains where concepts are inherently vague and ill-defined , and can not be given a crisp definition . A notion of approximate concept mapping is required in such domains , but until now , no such notion is vailable . The first contribution of this paper is a definition for approximate mappings between concepts . Roughly , a mapping between two concepts is decomposed into a number of submappings , and a sloppiness value determines the fraction of these submappings that can be ignored when establishing the mapping . A potential problem of such a definition is that with an increasing sloppiness value , it will gradually allow mappings between any two arbitrary concepts . To improve on this trivial behavior , we need to design a heuristic weighting which minimises the sloppiness required to conclude desirable matches , but at the same time maximises the sloppiness required to conclude undesirable matches . The second contribution of this paper is to show that a Google based similarity measure has exactly these desirable properties . We establish these results by experimental validation in the domain of musical genres . We show that this domain does suffer from ill-defined concepts . We take two real-life genre hierarchies from the Web , we compute approximate mappings between them at varying levels of sloppiness , and we validate our results against a handcrafted Gold Standard . Our method makes use of the huge amount of knowledge that is implicit in the current Web , and exploits this knowledge as a heuristic for establishing approximate mappings between ill-defined concepts .

O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

knowledge representation formalisms and methods


A link classification based approach to website topic hierarchy generation Hierarchical models are commonly used to organize a Website 's content . A Website 's content structure can be represented by a topic hierarchy , a directed tree rooted at a Website 's homepage in which the vertices and edges correspond to Web pages and hyperlinks . In this work , we propose a new method for constructing the topic hierarchy of a Website . We model the Website 's link structure using weighted directed graph , in which the edge weights are computed using a classifier that predicts if an edge connects a pair of nodes representing a topic and a sub-topic . We then pose the problem of building the topic hierarchy as finding the shortest-path tree and directed minimum spanning tree in the weighted graph . We 've done extensive experiments using real Websites and obtained very promising results .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Effective web-scale crawling through website analysis The web crawler space is often delimited into two general areas : full-web crawling and focused crawling . We present netSifter , a crawler system which integrates features from these two areas to provide an effective mechanism for web-scale crawling . netSifter utilizes a combination of page-level analytics and heuristics which are applied to a sample of web pages from a given website . These algorithms score individual web pages to determine the general utility of the overall website . In doing so , netSifter can formulate an in-depth opinion of a website ( and the entirety of its web pages ) with a relative minimum of work . netSifter is then able to bias the future efforts of its crawl towards higher quality websites , and away from the myriad of low quality websites and crawler traps that litter the World Wide Web .

O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O B O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

sampling
software architectures
uima
webfountain


Segment-based proxy caching of multimedia streams

multimedia information systems
multimedia streaming
segment-based caching
variable-sized segmentation
video caching


An information state-based dialogue manager for making voice web smarter In this paper we propose the integration of intelligent components technologies ( natural language and discourse management ) in voice web interfaces to make them smarter . We describe how we have integrated reusable components of dialogue management and language processing in a multilingual voice system to improve its friendliness and portability . The dialogue management component deals with complex dialogue phenomena , such as user-initiative dialogues , and follows the information state-based theory . The resulting dialogue system supports friendly communication ( through the telephone and the web ) in several languages : English , Spanish , Catalan and Italian . The dialogue system has been adapted to guide the users to access online public administration services .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

dialogue management
voice web interfaces

multilinguality
user interface management systems


WAND : a meta-data maintenance system over the internet WAND is a meta-data management system that provides a file-system tree for users of an internet based P2P network . The tree is robust and retains its structure even when nodes ( peers ) enter and leave the network . The robustness is based on a concept of virtual folders that are automatically created to retain paths to lower level folders whenever a node hosting a higher-level folder moves away . Other contributions of the WAND system include its novel approach towards managing root directory information and handling network partitions .

O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

meta-data
peer-to-peer
wide-area distributed file system


WEBCAP : a capacity planning tool for web resource management A staggering number of multimedia applications are being introduced every day . Yet , the inordinate delays encountered in retrieving multimedia documents make it difficult to use the Web for real-time applications such as educational broadcasting , video conferencing , and multimedia streaming . The problem of delivering multimedia documents in time while placing the least demands on the client , network and server resources is a challenging optimization problem . The WEBCAP is ongoing project that explores applying capacity planning techniques to manage or tune the Web resources ( client , network , server ) for optimal or near optimal performance , subject to minimizing the retrieval cost while satisfying the real-time constraints and available resources . The WEBCAP project consists of four software modules : object extractor , object representer , object scheduler , and system tuner . The four modules are connected serially with 3 feedback-loops . In this paper , we focus on how to extract objects from multimedia document and how to represent them as object and operation flow graphs while maintaining precedence relations among the objects .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

capacity-planning
performance evaluation
scheduling


XJ : integration of XML processing into java The increased importance of XML as a universal data representation format has led to several proposals for enabling the development of applications that operate on XML data . These proposals range from runtime API-based interfaces to XML-based programming languages . The subject of this paper is XJ , a research language that proposes novel mechanisms for the integration of XML as a first-class construct into JavaTM . The design goals of XJ distinguish it from pastwork on integrating XML support into programming languages -- specifically , the XJ design adheres to the XML Schema and XPathstandards , and supports in-place updates of XML data thereby keeping with the imperative nature of Java . We have also built a prototype compiler for XJ , and our preliminary experimental results demonstrate that the performance of XJ programs can approach that of tradition allow level API-based interfaces , while providing a higher level of abstraction .

O O O O B O O B O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

data integration
language constructs and features


Adding semantics to rosettaNet specifications The use of Semantic Web Service ( SWS ) technologies have been suggested to enable more dynamic B2B integration of heterogeneous systems and partners . We present how we add semantics to RosettaNet specifications to enable the WSMX SWS environment to automate mediation of messages . The benefits of applying SWS technologies include flexibility in accepting heterogeneity in B2B integrations .

O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

electronic data interchange
ontologysing
xml


Parallel crawlers In this paper we study how we can design an effective parallel crawler . As the size of the Web grows , it becomes imperative to parallelize a crawling process , in order to finish downloading pages in a reasonable amount of time . We first propose multiple architectures for a parallel crawler and identify fundamental issues related to parallel crawling . Based on this understanding , we then propose metrics to evaluate a parallel crawler , and compare the proposed architectures using 40 million pages collected from the Web . Our results clarify the relative merits of each architecture and provide a good guideline on when to adopt which architecture .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


RDFPeers : a scalable distributed RDF repository based on a structured peer-to-peer network Centralized Resource Description Framework ( RDF ) repositories have limitations both in their failure tolerance and in their scalability . Existing Peer-to-Peer ( P2P ) RDF repositories either can not guarantee to find query results , even if these results exist in the network , or require up-front definition of RDF schemas and designation of super peers . We present a scalable distributed RDF repository ( RDFPeers ) that stores each triple at three places in a multi-attribute addressable network by applying globally known hash functions to its subject predicate and object . Thus all nodes know which node is responsible for storing triple values they are looking for and both exact-match and range queries can be efficiently routed to those nodes . RDFPeers has no single point of failure nor elevated peers and does not require the prior definition of RDF schemas . Queries are guaranteed to find matched triples in the network if the triples exist . In RDFPeers both the number of neighbors per node and the number of routing hops for inserting RDF triples and for resolving most queries are logarithmic to the number of nodes in the network . We further performed experiments that show that the triple-storing load in RDFPeers differs by less than an order of magnitude between the most and the least loaded nodes for real-world RDF data .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

distributed rdf repositories
peer-to-peer
semantic web


Towards context-aware adaptable web services In this paper , we present a context framework that facilitates the development and deployment of context-aware adaptable Web services . Web services are provided with context information about clients that may be utilized to provide a personalized behavior . Context is extensible with new types of information at any time without any changes to the underlying infrastructure . Context processing is done by Web services , context plugins , or context services . Context plugins and context services pre - and post-process Web service messages based on the available contextinformation . Both are essential for automatic context processing and automatic adaption of Web services to new context types without the necessity to adjust the Web services themselves . We implemented the context framework within the ServiceGlobe system , our open and distributed Web service platform .

O O O B I O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O B I O B I O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O B I O B O O O B O O B O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O B I O O B O O O O O O O B I O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O B I O

automatic context processing
context
service platform
web services

extensibility
extensible framework
information services


Translating XSLT programs to Efficient SQL queries We present an algorithm for translating XSLT programs into SQL . Our context is that of virtual XML publishing , in which a single XML view is defined from a relational database , and subsequently queried with XSLT programs . Each XSLT program is translated into a single SQL query and run entirely in the database engine . Our translation works for a large fragment of XSLT , which we define , that includes descendant\/ancestor axis , recursive templates , modes , parameters , and aggregates . We put considerable effort in generating correct and efficient SQL queries and describe several optimization techniques to achieve this efficiency . We have tested our system on all 22 SQL queries of the TPC-H database benchmark which we represented in XSLT and then translated back to SQL using our translator .

O B O O O B O O O O O O O B O O B O O O O O O O B O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O B O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O B O O O O


Building term suggestion relational graphs from collective intelligence This paper proposes an effective approach to provide relevant search terms for conceptual Web search . ` Semantic Term Suggestion ' function has been included so that users can find the most appropriate query term to what they really need . Conventional approaches for term suggestion involve extracting frequently occurring key terms from retrieved documents . They must deal with term extraction difficulties and interference from irrelevant documents . In this paper , we propose a semantic term suggestion function called Collective Intelligence based Term Suggestion ( CITS ) . CITS provides a novel social-network based framework for relevant terms suggestion with a semantic graph of the search term without limiting to the specific query term . A visualization of semantic graph is presented to the users to help browsing search results from related terms in the semantic graph . The search results are ranked each time according to their relevance to the related terms in the entire query session . Comparing to two popular commercial search engines , a user study of 18 users on 50 search terms showed better user satisfactions and indicated the potential usefulness of proposed method in real-world search applications .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

keyword expansion
re-ranking
social network


A metro map metaphor for guided tours on the Web : the Webvise guided tour system


Migrating web application sessions in mobile computing The capability to change user agent while working is starting to appear in state of the art mobile computing due to the proliferation of different kinds of devices , ranging from personal wireless devices to desktop computers , and to the consequent necessity of migrating working sessions from a device to a more apt one . Research results related to the hand-off at low level are not sufficient to solve the problem at application level . The paper presents a scheme for session hand-off in Web applications which , by exploiting a proxy-based architecture , is able to work without interventions on existing code .

O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Antourage : mining distance-constrained trips from flickr We study how to automatically extract tourist trips from large volumes of geo-tagged photographs . Working with more than 8 million of these photographs that are publicly available via photo - sharing communities such as Flickr and Panoramio , our goal is to satisfy the needs of a tourist who specifies a starting location ( typically a hotel ) together with a bounded travel distance and demands a tour that visits the popular sites along the way . Our system , named ANTOURAGE , solves this intractable problem using a novel adaptation of the max-min ant system ( MMAS ) meta-heuristic . Experiments using GPS metadata crawled from Flickr show that ANTOURAGE can generate high-quality tours .

O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O

geolocation
graph mining
photo collections
trip planning


Highlighting disputed claims on the web We describe Dispute Finder , a browser extension that alerts a user when information they read online is disputed by a source that they might trust . Dispute Finder examines the text on the page that the user is browsing and highlights any phrases that resemble known disputed claims . If a user clicks on a highlighted phrase then Dispute Finder shows them a list of articles that support other points of view . Dispute Finder builds a database of known disputed claims by crawling web sites that already maintain lists of disputed claims , and by allowing users to enter claims that they believe are disputed . Dispute Finder identifies snippets that make known disputed claims by running a simple textual entailment algorithm inside the browser extension , referring to a cached local copy of the claim database . In this paper , we explain the design of Dispute Finder , and the trade-offs between the various design decisions that we explored .

O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

annotation
argumentation
cscw
decision support
miscellaneous
sensemaking


A hybrid phish detection approach by identity discovery and keywords retrieval Phishing is a significant security threat to the Internet , which causes tremendous economic loss every year . In this paper , we proposed a novel hybrid phish detection method based on information extraction ( IE ) and information retrieval ( IR ) techniques . The identity-based component of our method detects phishing webpages by directly discovering the inconsistency between their identity and the identity they are imitating . The keywords-retrieval component utilizes IR algorithms exploiting the power of search engines to identify phish . Our method requires no training data , no prior knowledge of phishing signatures and specific implementations , and thus is able to adapt quickly to constantly appearing new phishing patterns . Comprehensive experiments over a diverse spectrum of data sources with 11449 pages show that both components have a low false positive rate and the stacked approach achieves a true positive rate of 90.06 % with a false positive rate of 1.95 % .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

anti-phishing
information search and retrieval
named entity recognition
natural language processing
security and protection


Price modeling in standards for electronic product catalogs based on XML The fast spreading of electronic business-to-business procurement systems has led to the development of new standards for the exchange of electronic product catalogs ( e-catalogs ) . E-catalogs contain various information about products , essential is price information . Prices are used for buying decisions and following order transactions . While simple price models are often sufficient for the description of indirect goods ( e.g. office supplies ) , other goods and lines of business make higher demands . In this paper we examine what price information is contained in commercial XML standards for the exchange of product catalog data . For that purpose we bring the different implicit price models of the examined catalog standards together and provide a generalized model .

O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

b2b e-business e-catalog e-procurement pricing


ViBE : virtual biology experiments

computer-assisted instruction
distributed learning
elicitation methods
software design
virtual laboratories


A dual-mode user interface for accessing 3D content on the world wide web The Web evolved from a text-based system to the current rich and interactive medium that supports images , 2D graphics , audio and video . The major media type that is still missing is 3D graphics . Although various approaches have been proposed ( most notably VRML\/X3D ) , they have not been widely adopted . One reason for the limited acceptance is the lack of 3D interaction techniques that are optimal for the hypertext-based Web interface . We present a novel strategy for accessing integrated information spaces , where hypertext and 3D graphics data are simultaneously available and linked . We introduce a user interface that has two modes between which a user can switch anytime : the driven by simple hypertext-based interactions `` do n't - make-me-think '' mode , where a 3D scene is embedded in hypertext and the more immersive 3D `` take-me-to-the-Wonderland '' mode , which immerses the hypertextual annotations into the 3D scene . A user study is presented , which characterizes the user interface in terms of its efficiency and usability .

O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O B I O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O


Law-governed peer-to-peer auctions This paper proposes a flexible architecture for the creation of Internet auctions . It allows the custom definition of the auction parameters , and provides a decentralized control of the auction process . Auction policies are defined as laws in the Law Governed Interaction ( LGI ) paradigm . Each of these laws specifies not only the auction algorithm itself ( e.g. open-cry , dutch , etc. ) but also how to handle the other parameters usually involved in the online auctions , such as certification , auditioning , and treatment of complaints . LGI is used to enforce the rules established in the auction policy within the agents involved in the process . After the agents find out about the actions , they interact in a peer-to-peer communication protocol , reducing the role of the centralized auction room to an advertising registry , and taking profit of the distributed nature of the Internet to conduct the auction . The paper presents an example of an auction law , illustrating the use of the proposed architecture .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

law governed interaction
online auctions

distributed enforcement
distributed systems
software architectures


GlobeDB : autonomic data replication for web applications We present GlobeDB , a system for hosting Web applications that performs autonomic replication of application data . GlobeDB offers data-intensive Web applications the benefits of low access latencies and reduced update traffic . The major distinction in our system compared to existing edge computing infrastructures is that the process of distribution and replication of application data is handled by the system automatically with very little manual administration . We show that significant performance gains can be obtained this way . Performance evaluations with the TPC-W benchmark over an emulated wide-area network show that GlobeDB reduces latencies by a factor of 4 compared to non-replicated systems and reduces update traffic by a factor of 6 compared to fully replicated systems .

O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

distributed systems
edge services
rerformance


EntityTagger : automatically tagging entities with descriptive phrases We consider the problem of entity tagging : given one or more named entities from a specific domain , the goal is to automatically associate descriptive phrases , referred to as etags ( entity tags ) , to each entity . Consider a product catalog containing product names and possibly short descriptions . For a product in the catalog , say Ricoh G600 Digital Camera , we want to associate etags such as `` water resistant '' , `` rugged '' and `` outdoor '' to it , even though its name or description does not mention those phrases . Entity tagging can enable more effective search over entities . We propose to leverage signals in web documents to perform such tagging . We develop techniques to perform such tagging in a domain independent manner while ensuring high precision and high recall .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

miscellaneous
tag association
tag discovery


A scalable machine-learning approach for semi-structured named entity recognition Named entity recognition studies the problem of locating and classifying parts of free text into a set of predefined categories . Although extensive research has focused on the detection of person , location and organization entities , there are many other entities of interest , including phone numbers , dates , times and currencies ( to name a few examples ) . We refer to these types of entities as `` semi-structured named entities '' , since they usually follow certain syntactic formats according to some conventions , although their structure is typically not well-defined . Regular expression solutions require significant amount of manual effort and supervised machine learning approaches rely on large sets of labeled training data . Therefore , these approaches do not scale when we need to support many semi-structured entity types in many languages and regions . In this paper , we study this problem and propose a novel three-level bootstrapping framework for the detection of semi-structured entities . We describe the proposed techniques for phone , date and time entities , and perform extensive evaluations on English , German , Polish , Swedish and Turkish documents . Despite the minimal input from the user , our approach can achieve 95 % precision and 84 % recall for phone entities , and 94 % precision and 81 % recall for date and time entities , on average . We also discuss implementation details and report run time performance results , which show significant improvements over regular expression based solutions .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

boostrapping algorithm
natural language processing
ner
weakly-supervised learning


Using landing pages for sponsored search ad selection We explore the use of the landing page content in sponsored search ad selection . Specifically , we compare the use of the ad 's intrinsic content to augmenting the ad with the whole , or parts , of the landing page . We explore two types of extractive summarization techniques to select useful regions from the landing pages : out-of-context and in-context methods . Out-of-context methods select salient regions from the landing page by analyzing the content alone , without taking into account the ad associated with the landing page . In-context methods use the ad context ( including its title , creative , and bid phrases ) to help identify regions of the landing page that should be used by the ad selection engine . In addition , we introduce a simple yet effective unsupervised algorithm to enrich the ad context to further improve the ad selection . Experimental evaluation confirms that the use of landing pages can significantly improve the quality of ad selection . We also find that our extractive summarization techniques reduce the size of landing pages substantially , while retaining or even improving the performance of ad retrieval over the method that utilize the entire landing page .

O B I O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

extractive summarization
landing pages
sponsored search


Mobile search pattern evolution : the trend and the impact of voice queries In this paper we study the characteristics of search queries submitted from mobile devices using Yahoo ! Search for Mobile during a 2 months period in early of 2010 , and compare the results with a similar study conducted in late 2007 . The major findings include 1 ) mobile search queries have become much more diverse , and 2 ) user interest and information needs have been substantially changed at least in some areas of search topics , including adult and local intent queries . In addition we investigate the impact of voice query search interface offered by Yahoo ! 's mobile search service . We examine how unstructured spoken queries differ from conventional search queries .

B I O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

information search and retrieval
mobile queries
mobile search query analysis
query categorization
query log analysis


Incentivizing high-quality user-generated content We model the economics of incentivizing high-quality user generated content ( UGC ) , motivated by settings such as online review forums , question-answer sites , and comments on news articles and blogs . We provide a game-theoretic model within which to study the problem of incentivizing high quality UGC , in which contributors are strategic and motivated by exposure . Our model has the feature that both the quality of contributions as well as the extent of participation is determined endogenously in a free-entry Nash equilibrium . The model predicts , as observed in practice , that if exposure is independent of quality , there will be a flood of low quality contributions in equilibrium . An ideal mechanism in this context would elicit both high quality and high participation in equilibrium , with near-optimal quality as the available attention diverges , and should be easily implementable in practice . We consider a very simple elimination mechanism , which subjects each contribution to rating by some number A of viewers , and eliminates any contributions that are not uniformly rated positively . We construct and analyze free-entry Nash equilibria for this mechanism , and show that A can be chosen to achieve quality that tends to optimal , along with diverging participation , as the number of viewers diverges .

O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

attention economics
game theory
quality of online content


Supporting anonymous location queries in mobile environments with privacygrid This paper presents PrivacyGrid - a framework for supporting anonymous location-based queries in mobile information delivery systems . The PrivacyGrid framework offers three unique capabilities . First , it provides a location privacy protection preference profile model , called location P3P , which allows mobile users to explicitly define their preferred location privacy requirements in terms of both location hiding measures ( e.g. , location k-anonymity and location l-diversity ) and location service quality measures ( e.g. , maximum spatial resolution and maximum temporal resolution ) . Second , it provides fast and effective location cloaking algorithms for location k-anonymity and location l-diversity in a mobile environment . We develop dynamic bottom-up and top-down grid cloaking algorithms with the goal of achieving high anonymization success rate and efficiency in terms of both time complexity and maintenance cost . A hybrid approach that carefully combines the strengths of both bottom-up and top-down cloaking approaches to further reduce the average anonymization time is also developed . Last but not the least , PrivacyGrid incorporates temporal cloaking into the location cloaking process to further increase the success rate of location anonymization . We also discuss PrivacyGrid mechanisms for supporting anonymous location queries . Experimental evaluation shows that the PrivacyGrid approach can provide close to optimal location k-anonymity as defined by per user location P3P without introducing significant performance penalties .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Causal relation of queries from temporal logs In this paper , we study a new problem of mining causal relation of queries in search engine query logs . Causal relation between two queries means event on one query is the causation of some event on the other . We first detect events in query logs by efficient statistical frequency threshold . Then the causal relation of queries is mined by the geometric features of the events . Finally the Granger Causality Test ( GCT ) is utilized to further re-rank the causal relation of queries according to their GCT coefficients . In addition , we develop a 2-dimensional visualization tool to display the detected relationship of events in a more intuitive way . The experimental results on the MSN search engine query logs demonstrate that our approach can accurately detect the events in temporal query logs and the causal relation of queries is detected effectively .

B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O


Using web structure for classifying and describing web pages The structure of the web is increasingly being used to improve organization , search , and analysis of information on the web . For example , Google uses the text in citing documents ( documents that link to the target document ) for search . We analyze the relative utility of document text , and the text in citing documents near the citation , for classification and description . Results show that the text in citing documents , when available , often has greater discriminative and descriptive power than the text in the target document itself . The combination of evidence from a document and citing documents can improve on either information source alone . Moreover , by ranking words and phrases in the citing documents according to expected entropy loss , we are able to accurately name clusters of web pages , even with very few positive examples . Our results confirm , quantify , and extend previous research using web structure in these areas , introducing new methods for classification and description of pages .

O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O B O O O O O

anchortext
cluster naming
entropy based feature extraction
evaluation
svm
web directory


Search shortcuts : driving users towards their goals Giving suggestions to users of Web-based services is a common practice aimed at enhancing their navigation experience . Major Web Search Engines usually provide `` Suggestions '' under the form of queries that are , to some extent , related to the current query typed by the user , and the knowledge learned from the past usage of the system . In this work we introduce `` Search Shortcuts '' as `` Successful '' queries allowed , in the past , users to satisfy their information needs . Differently from conventional suggestion techniques , our search shortcuts allows to evaluate effectiveness by exploiting a simple train-and-test approach . We have applied several Collaborative Filtering algorithms to this problem , evaluating them on a real query log data . We generate the shortcuts from all user sessions belonging to the testing set , and measure the quality of the shortcuts suggested by considering the similarity between them and the navigational user behavior .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Access control enforcement for conversation-based web services Service Oriented Computing is emerging as the main approach to build distributed enterprise applications on the Web . The widespread use of Web services is hindered by the lack of adequate security and privacy support . In this paper , we present a novel framework for enforcing access control in conversation-based Web services . Our approach takes into account the conversational nature of Web services . This is in contrast with existing approaches to access control enforcement that assume a Web service as a set of independent operations . Furthermore , our approach achieves a tradeoff between the need to protect Web service 's access control policies and the need to disclose to clients the portion of access control policies related to the conversations they are interested in . This is important to avoid situations where the client can not progress in the conversation due to the lack of required security requirements . We introduce the concept of k-trustworthiness that defines the conversations for which a client can provide credentials maximizing the likelihood that it will eventually hit a final state .

B I O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O B I O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

access control
conversations
web services


Monitoring the dynamic web to respond to continuous queries Continuous queries are queries for which responses given to users must be continuously updated , as the sources of interest get updated . Such queries occur , for instance , during on-line decision making , e.g. , traffic flow control , weather monitoring , etc. . The problem of keeping the responses current reduces to the problem of deciding how often to visit a source to determine if and how it has been modified , in order to update earlier responses accordingly . On the surface , this seems to be similar to the crawling problem since crawlers attempt to keep indexes up-to-date as pages change and users pose search queries . We show that this is not the case , both due to the inherent differences between the nature of the two problems as well as the performance metric . We propose , develop and evaluate a novel multi-phase ( Continuous Adaptive Monitoring ) ( CAM ) solution to the problem of maintaining the currency of query results . Some of the important phases are : The tracking phase , in which changes , to an initially identified set of relevant pages , are tracked . From the observed change characteristics of these pages , a probabilistic model of their change behavior is formulated and weights are assigned to pages to denote their importance for the current queries . During the next phase , the resource allocation phase , based on these statistics , resources , needed to continuously monitor these pages for changes , are allocated . Given these resource allocations , the scheduling phase produces an optimal achievable schedule for the monitoring tasks . An experimental evaluation of our approach compared to prior approaches for crawling dynamic web pages shows the effectiveness of CAM for monitoring dynamic changes . For example , by monitoring just 5 % of the page changes , CAM is able to return 90 % of the changed information to the users . The experiments also produce some interesting observations pertaining to the differences between the two problems of crawling -- to build an index -- and the problem of change tracking -- to respond to continuous queries .

O O O O O O O B I B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O

allocation policies
information systems applications


Tv2web : generating and browsing web with multiple lod from video streams and their metadata We propose a method of automatically constructing Web content from video streams with metadata that we call TV2Web . The Web content includes thumbnails of video units and caption data generated from metadata . Users can watch TV ona normal Web browser . They can also manipulate Web content with zooming metaphors to seamlessly alter the level of detail ( LOD ) of the content being viewed . They can search for favorite scenes faster than with analog video equipment , and experience a new cross-media environment . We also developed a prototype of the TV2Web system and discuss its implementation .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

web browser from video streams and their metadat


A multi-threaded PIPELINED Web server architecture for SMP\/SoC machines Design of high performance Web servers has become a recent research thrust to meet the increasing demand of network-based services . In this paper , we propose a new Web server architecture , called multi-threaded PIPELINED Web server , suitable for Symmetric Multi-Processor ( SMP ) or System-on-Chip ( SoC ) architectures . The proposed PIPELINED model consists of multiple thread pools , where each thread pool consists of five basic threads and two helper threads . The main advantages of the proposed model are global information sharing by the threads , minimal synchronization overhead due to less number of threads , and non-blocking I\/O operations , possible with the helper threads . We have conducted an in-depth performance analysis of the proposed server model along with four prior Web server models ( Multi-Process ( MP ) , Multi-Thread ( MT ) , Single-Process Event-Driven ( SPED ) and Asynchronous Multi-Process Event-Driven ( AMPED ) ) via simulation using six Web server workloads . The experiments are conducted to investigate the impact of various factors such as the memory size , disk speed and numbers of clients . The simulation results indicate that the proposed PIPELINED Web server architecture shows the best performance across all system and workload parameters compared to the MP , MT , SPED and AMPED models . Although the MT and AMPED models show competitive performance with less number of processors , the advantage of the PIPELINED model becomes obvious as the number of processors or clients in an SMP\/SoC machine increases . The MP model shows the worst performance in most of the cases . The results indicate that the proposed server architecture can be used in future large-scale SMP\/SoC machines to boost system performance .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

asynchronous multi-process event-driven
multi-process
multi-thread
single event-driven process
symmetric multi-processor
system-on-chip


A clustering method for news articles retrieval system Organizing the results of a search facilitates the user in overviewing the information returned . We regard the clustering task as the tasks of making labels for a list of items and we focus on news articles and propose a clustering method that uses named entity extraction .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O

document clustering
search result organization


Mixed-initiative , multi-source information assistants


Measuring the similarity between implicit semantic relations from the web Measuring the similarity between semantic relations that hold among entities is an important and necessary step in various Web related tasks such as relation extraction , information retrieval and analogy detection . For example , consider the case in which a person knows a pair of entities ( e.g. Google , YouTube ) , between which a particular relation holds ( e.g. acquisition ) . The person is interested in retrieving other such pairs with similar relations ( e.g. Microsoft , Powerset ) . Existing keyword-based search engines can not be applied directly in this case because , in keyword-based search , the goal is to retrieve documents that are relevant to the words used in a query -- not necessarily to the relations implied by a pair of words . We propose a relational similarity measure , using a Web search engine , to compute the similarity between semantic relations implied by two pairs of words . Our method has three components : representing the various semantic relations that exist between a pair of words using automatically extracted lexical patterns , clustering the extracted lexical patterns to identify the different patterns that express a particular semantic relation , and measuring the similarity between semantic relations using a metric learning approach . We evaluate the proposed method in two tasks : classifying semantic relations between named entities , and solving word-analogy questions . The proposed method outperforms all baselines in a relation classification task with a statistically significant average precision score of 0.74 . Moreover , it reduces the time taken by Latent Relational Analysis to process 374 word-analogy questions from 9 days to less than 6 hours , with an SAT score of 51 % .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Recommendations for the long tail by term-query graph We define a new approach to the query recommendation problem . In particular , our main goal is to design a model enabling the generation of query suggestions also for rare and previously unseen queries . In other words we are targeting queries in the long tail . The model is based on a graph having two sets of nodes : Term nodes , and Query nodes . The graph induces a Markov chain on which a generic random walker starts from a subset of Term nodes , moves along Query nodes , and restarts ( with a given probability ) only from the same initial subset of Term nodes . Computing the stationary distribution of such a Markov chain is equivalent to extracting the so-called Center-piece Subgraph from the graph associated with the Markov chain itself . Given a query , we extract its terms and we set the restart subset to this term set . Therefore , we do not require a query to have been previously observed for the recommending model to be able to generate suggestions .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

query recommender systems
web search effectiveness


A graph-theoretic approach to webpage segmentation We consider the problem of segmenting a webpage into visually and semantically cohesive pieces . Our approach is based on formulating an appropriate optimization problem on weighted graphs , where the weights capture if two nodes in the DOM tree should be placed together or apart in the segmentation ; we present a learning framework to learn these weights from manually labeled data in a principled manner . Our work is a significant departure from previous heuristic and rule-based solutions to the segmentation problem . The results of our empirical analysis bring out interesting aspects of our framework , including variants of the optimization problem and the role of learning .

O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

correlation clustering
energy minimization
graph cuts
miscellaneous
webpage sectioning


Retaining personal expression for social search Web is being extensively used for personal expression , which includes ratings , reviews , recommendations , blogs . This user created content , e.g. book review on Amazon.com , becomes the property of the website , and the user often does not have easy access to it . In some cases , user 's feedback may get averaged with feedback from other users e.g. ratings of a video . We argue that the creator of such content needs to be able to retain ( a link to ) her created content . We introduce the concept of MEB which is a user controlled store of such retained links . A MEB allows a user to access\/share all the reviews she has given on different websites . With this capability users can allow their friends to search through their feedback . Searching through one 's social network allows harnessing the power of social networks where known relationships provide the context & trust necessary to interpret feedback .

O O O O B B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

2.0
communications applications
social networks
systems and software
user content
web2.0


Open and decentralized access across location-based services Users now interact with multiple Location-Based Services ( LBS ) through a myriad set of location-aware devices and interfaces . However , current LBS tend to be centralized silos with ad-hoc APIs , which limits potential for information sharing and reuse . Further , LBS subscriptions and user experiences are not easily portable across devices . We propose a general architecture for providing open and decentralized access to LBS , based on Tiled Feeds - a RESTful protocol for access and interactions with LBS using feeds , and Feed Subscription Management ( FSM ) - a generalized feed-based service management protocol . We describe two client designs , and demonstrate how they enable standardized access to LBS services , promote information sharing and mashup creation , and offer service management across various types of location-enabled devices .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

atom
location-based services
on-line information services
rss


Searching the workplace web The social impact from the World Wide Web can not be underestimated , but technologies used to build the Web are also revolutionizing the sharing of business and government information within intranets . In many ways the lessons learned from the Internet carry over directly to intranets , but others do not apply . In particular , the social forces that guide the development of intranets are quite different , and the determination of a `` good answer '' for intranet search is quite different than on the Internet . In this paper we study the problem of intranet search . Our approach focuses on the use of rank aggregation , and allows us to examine the effects of different heuristics on ranking of search results .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Keyword extraction for social snippets Today , a huge amount of text is being generated for social purposes on social networking services on the Web . Unlike traditional documents , such text is usually extremely short and tends to be informal . Analysis of such text benefit many applications such as advertising , search , and content filtering . In this work , we study one traditional text mining task on such new form of text , that is extraction of meaningful keywords . We propose several intuitive yet useful features and experiment with various classification models . Evaluation is conducted on Facebook data . Performances of various features and models are reported and compared .

B I O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


An adaptive model for optimizing performance of an incremental web crawler

incremental crawler
interaction styles
optimization
performance evaluation
scalability


Generating maps of web pages using cellular automata The aim of web pages visualization is to present in a very informative and interactive way a set of web documents to the user in order to let him or her navigate through these documents . In the web context , this may correspond to several user 's tasks : displaying the results of a search engine , or visualizing a graph of pages such as a hypertext or a surf map . In addition to web pages visualization , web pages clustering also greatly improves the amount of information presented to the user by highlighting the similarities between the documents ( 6 ) . In this paper we explore the use of a cellular automata ( CA ) to generate such maps of web pages .

O O O B I O B I O O O B I B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I B O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O B I O

cellular automata
visualization
web pages


Fine grained content-based adaptation mechanism for providing high end-user quality of experience with adaptive hypermedia systems New communication technologies can enable Web users to access personalised information `` anytime , anywhereö . However , the network environments allowing this `` anytime , anywhereö access may have widely varying performance characteristics such as bandwidth , level of congestion , mobility support , and cost of transmission . It is unrealistic to expect that the quality of delivery of the same content can be maintained in this variable environment , but rather an effort must be made to fit the content served to the current delivery conditions , thus ensuring high Quality of Experience ( QoE ) to the users . This paper introduces an end-user QoE-aware adaptive hypermedia framework that extends the adaptation functionality of adaptive hypermedia systems with a fine-grained content-based adaptation mechanism . The proposed mechanism attempts to take into account multiple factors affecting QoE in relation to the delivery of Web content . Various simulation tests investigate the performance improvements provided by this mechanism , in a home-like , low bit rate operational environment , in terms of access time per page , aggregate access time per browsing session and quantity of transmitted information .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

computer uses in education
content-based adaptation mechanism
distance education
end-user quality of experience


Recommending questions using the mdl-based tree cut model The paper is concerned with the problem of question recommendation . Specifically , given a question as query , we are to retrieve and rank other questions according to their likelihood of being good recommendations of the queried question . A good recommendation provides alternative aspects around users ' interest . We tackle the problem of question recommendation in two steps : first represent questions as graphs of topic terms , and then rank recommendations on the basis of the graphs . We formalize both steps as the tree-cutting problems and then employ the MDL ( Minimum Description Length ) for selecting the best cuts . Experiments have been conducted with the real questions posted at Yahoo ! Answers . The questions are about two domains , ` travel ' and ` computers & internet ' . Experimental results indicate that the use of the MDL-based tree cut model can significantly outperform the baseline methods of word-based VSM or phrase-based VSM . The results also show that the use of the MDL-based tree cut model is essential to our approach .

O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O

minimum description length
question recommendation
tree cut model


Analyzing seller practices in a Brazilian marketplace E-commerce is growing at an exponential rate . In the last decade , there has been an explosion of online commercial activity enabled by World Wide Web ( WWW ) . These days , many consumers are less attracted to online auctions , preferring to buy merchandise quickly using fixed-price negotiations . Sales at Amazon.com , the leader in online sales of fixed-price goods , rose 37 % in the first quarter of 2008 . At eBay , where auctions make up 58 % of the site 's sales , revenue rose 14 % . In Brazil , probably by cultural influence , online auctions are not been popular . This work presents a characterization and analysis of fixed-price online negotiations . Using actual data from a Brazilian marketplace , we analyze seller practices , considering seller profiles and strategies . We show that different sellers adopt strategies according to their interests , abilities and experience . Moreover , we confirm that choosing a selling strategy is not simple , since it is important to consider the seller 's characteristics to evaluate the applicability of a strategy . The work also provides a comparative analysis of some selling practices in Brazil with popular worldwide marketplaces .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O B O

e-commerce
e-markets
electronic commerce


Model characterization curves for federated search using click-logs : predicting user engagement metrics for the span of feasible operating points Modern day federated search engines aggregate heterogeneous types of results from multiple vertical search engines and compose a single search engine result page ( SERP ) . The search engine aggregates the results and produces one ranked list , constraining the vertical results to specific slots on the SERP . The usual way to compare two ranking algorithms is to first fix their operating points ( internal thresholds ) , and then run an online experiment that lasts multiple weeks . Online user engagement metrics are then compared to decide which algorithm is better . However , this method does not characterize and compare the behavior over the entire span of operating points . Furthermore , this time-consuming approach is not practical if we have to conduct the experiment over numerous operating points . In this paper we propose a method of characterizing the performance of models that allows us to predict answers to `` what if '' questions about online user engagement using click-logs over the entire span of feasible operating points . We audition verticals at various slots on the SERP and generate click-logs . This log is then used to create operating curves between variables of interest ( for example between result quality and click-through ) . The operating point for the system then can be chosen to achieve a specific trade-off between the variables . We apply this methodology to predict i ) the online performance of two different models , ii ) the impact of changing internal quality thresholds on clickthrough , iii ) the behavior of introducing a new feature , iv ) which machine learning loss function will give better online engagement , v ) the impact of sampling distribution of head and tail queries in the training process . The results are reported on a well-known federated search engine . We validate the predictions with online experiments .

O O O O O O O O O O B I B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

information search and retrieval
offline prediction
online evaluation
randomization


The interoperability of learning object repositories and services : standards , implementations and lessons learned Interoperability is one of the main issues in creating a networked system of repositories . The eduSource project in its holisticapproach to building a network of learning object repositories in Canada is implementing an open network for learning services . Itsopenness is supported by a communication protocol called theeduSource Communications Layer ( ECL ) which closely implements the IMS Digital Repository Interoperability ( DRI ) specification and architecture . The ECL in conjunction withconnection middleware enables any service providers to join thenetwork . EduSource is open to external initiatives as it explicitlysupports an extensible bridging mechanism between eduSource and other major initiatives . This paper discusses interoperability in general and then focuses on the design of ECL as animplementation of IMS DRI with supporting infrastructure andmiddleware . The eduSource implementation is in the mature stateof its development as being deployed in different settings withdifferent partners . Two applications used in evaluating ourapproach are described : a gateway for connecting betweeneduSource and the NSDL initiative , and a federated searchconnecting eduSource , EdNA and SMETE .

O B O B I I O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

interoperability
learning object repositories