16330464
Detecting Document Genre for Personalization of Information Retrieval
We report on the effectiveness of language models for personalization of retrieval results based on a searcher’s preference for document genre. In principle, such preferences can be obtained via implicit relevance feedback through the observation of the searcher’s actions and behavior during search sessions. While our approach did not produce significant improvement to retrieval effectiveness, the methodology and experimental setting can and are being used for further work on exploring genre-based personalization.
3132637
Selecting books: a performance-based study
Our research compares the impact of paper vs. electronic presentation of text on the book selection process. Our focus is on the stage of book selection in which users study the content of a book to decide whether it is useful for their intended purpose. Effectiveness is operationalized as accurate determination of whether a non-fiction book contains enough discussion of a particular topic to be useful for a research paper. 24 undergraduates participated in a balanced study in which they were given a topic-book pair and asked to decide whether the book was useful for the topic. We explore the differences in performance, with specific reference to the role of the search function, table-of-contents and index
14971936
Does Familiarity Breed Content? Taking Account of Familiarity with a Topic in Personalizing Information Retrieval
We report on an evaluation of the effectiveness of considering a user's familiarity with a topic in improving information retrieval performance. This approach to personalization is based on previous results indicating differences in user search behavior and judgments according to his/her familiarity to the topic explored, and to research on using implicit sources of evidence to determine the user's context and preferences. Our attempt was to relate a topic-dependent concept and measure, familiarity with the topic, with topic-independent measures of documents such as readability, concreteness/abstractness, and specificity/generality. Contrary to our expectations, a user’s familiarity with a topic has no effect on the utility of readability or concrete/abstract scoring. We are encouraged, however, to find that high readability had a positive effect on search results, regardless of a user’s familiarity with a topic.
22924389
User preference: A measure of query-term quality
205485574
Assessing term effectiveness in the interactive information access process
This study addresses the question of whether the way in which sets of query terms are identified has an impact on the effectiveness of users' information seeking efforts. Query terms are text strings used as input to an information access system; they are products of a method or grammar that identifies a set of query terms. We conducted an experiment that compared the effectiveness of sets of query terms identified for a single book by three different methods. One had been previously prepared by a human indexer for a back-of-the-book index. The other two were identified by computer programs that used a combination of linguistic and statistical criteria to extract terms from full text. Effectiveness was measured by (1) whether selected query terms led participants to correct answers and (2) how long it took participants to obtain correct answers. Our results show that two sets of terms - the human terms and the set selected according to the linguistically more sophisticated criteria - were significantly more effective than the third set of terms. This single case demonstrates that query languages do have a measurable impact on the effectiveness of query term languages in the interactive information access process. The procedure described in this paper can be used to assess the effectiveness for information seekers of query terms identified by any query language.
13426917
Dependable Dynamic Service Integration on Service-Oriented Peer-to-Peer Networks
For provision of dependable search and rescue capability in dynamic and unpredictable disaster areas, the networked nodes should have the ability to autonomously support and co-operate with each other in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner to quickly configure any services available on the disaster area to deliver a real-time capability. In this paper, we present an innovative architectural approach which is able to proactively self-diagnose and self-adapt evolution occurring in provision of search and rescue capabilities in service-oriented P2P (ServP2P) networks. This architecture provides flexibility and agility in handling dynamic changes and evolution encountered in the delivery of rescue capability. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach provides a high-level of reliability and sustainability to achieve dependable service integration for capability provision.
27964880
Surface reconstruction from point set using projection operator
Step 1: Lay a grid over the input point set. Step 3: Mark all grid edges with projection vectors at their two ends pointing in opposite directions. Approximate the intersection points between the surface and these edges based on the magnitudes of their projection vectors. Step 4: For each grid cell, calculate a grid center as the average of all intersection points. For each marked edge, connect the centers of its incident cells to make a piece of the surface.
3041039
The Impacts of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems on Firm Performance: An Empirical Analysis of Chinese Chemical Firms
Chinese firms heavily invest in enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) in recent years and expect that ERP can help them gain superior financial performance. Given the high costs and high risk of ERP investments, to quantify the financial benefits of ERP implementation is an important research issue. This paper empirically examines the impacts of ERP implementation on firm performance using the financial data from 50 Chinese chemical firms that implemented ERP. The firms’ abnormal performance during the two-year implementation period and three-year post-implementation period was analyzed based on the guideline of Barber et al. on event studies. The results find no significant performance improvement during the implementation period and the three-year post-implementation period and a decline in performance in the first two years after implementation. However, a slight performance improvement in the third year after implementation may indicate that the financial benefits of ERP may show after a long-term ERP use. These results provide insight for Chinese firms that want to invest in ERP.
6333240
Web video topic discovery and tracking via bipartite graph reinforcement model
Automatic topic discovery and tracking on web-shared videos can greatly benefit both web service providers and end users. Most of current solutions of topic detection and tracking were done on news and cannot be directly applied on web videos, because the semantic information of web videos is much less than that of news videos. In this paper, we propose a bipartite graph model to address this issue. The bipartite graph represents the correlation between web videos and their keywords, and automatic topic discovery is achieved through two steps - coarse topic filtering and fine topic re-ranking. First, a weight-updating co-clustering algorithm is employed to filter out topic candidates at a coarse level. Then the videos on each topic are re-ranked by analyzing the link structures of the corresponding bipartite graph. After the topics are discovered, the interesting ones can also be tracked over a period of time using the same bipartite graph model. The key is to propagate the relevant scores and keywords from the videos of interests to other relevant ones through the bipartite graph links. Experimental results on real web videos from YouKu, a YouTube counterpart in China, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. We report very promising results.
1115065
An interactive tool for fitting surfaces to volume data
MRI and CT scanners have long been used to produce threeWe begin with a volume dataset. In this example, we have a CT scan of a human prostate. There are 256 slices. The figure to the right shows one input slice, along with rectangles that outline the locations of every 10th slice. We perform linear interpolation between each slice in the input dataset, and now we can render arbitrarily oriented image planes. The figure to the right shows one such plane.