From Keyword Search to Exploration: How Result Visualization Aids Discovery on the Web

A key to the Web's success is the power of search. The elegant way in which search results are returned is usually remarkably effective. However, for exploratory search in which users need to learn, discover, and understand novel or complex topics, there is substantial room for improvement. Human computer interaction researchers and web browser designers have developed novel strategies to improve Web search by enabling users to conveniently visualize, manipulate, and organize their Web search results. This monograph offers fresh ways to think about search-related cognitive processes and describes innovative design approaches to browsers and related tools. For instance, while key word search presents users with results for specific information (e.g., what is the capitol of Peru), other methods may let users see and explore the contexts of their requests for information (related or previous work, conflicting information), or the properties that associate groups of information assets (group legal decisions by lead attorney). We also consider the both traditional and novel ways in which these strategies have been evaluated. From our review of cognitive processes, browser design, and evaluations, we reflect on the future opportunities and new paradigms for exploring and interacting with Web search results

A geo-temporal information extraction service for processing descriptive metadata in digital libraries

In the context of digital map libraries, resources are usually described according to metadata records that define the relevant subject, location, time-span, format and keywords. On what concerns locations and time-spans, metadata records are often incomplete or they provide information in a way that is not machine-understandable (e.g. textual descriptions). This paper presents techniques for extracting geotemporal information from text, using relatively simple text mining methods that leverage on a Web gazetteer service. The idea is to go from human-made geotemporal referencing (i.e. using place and period names in textual expressions) into geo-spatial coordinates and time-spans. A prototype system, implementing the proposed methods, is described in detail. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approaches

Smartphone picture organization: a hierarchical approach

We live in a society where the large majority of the population has a camera-equipped smartphone. In addition, hard drives and cloud storage are getting cheaper and cheaper, leading to a tremendous growth in stored personal photos. Unlike photo collections captured by a digital camera, which typically are pre-processed by the user who organizes them into event-related folders, smartphone pictures are automatically stored in the cloud. As a consequence, photo collections captured by a smartphone are highly unstructured and because smartphones are ubiquitous, they present a larger variability compared to pictures captured by a digital camera. To solve the need of organizing large smartphone photo collections automatically, we propose here a new methodology for hierarchical photo organization into topics and topic-related categories. Our approach successfully estimates latent topics in the pictures by applying probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, and automatically assigns a name to each topic by relying on a lexical database. Topic-related categories are then estimated by using a set of topic-specific Convolutional Neuronal Networks. To validate our approach, we ensemble and make public a large dataset of more than 8,000 smartphone pictures from 40 persons. Experimental results demonstrate major user satisfaction with respect to state of the art solutions in terms of organization.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

A framework for evaluating automatic indexing or classification in the context of retrieval

Tools for automatic subject assignment help deal with scale and sustainability in creating and enriching metadata, establishing more connections across and between resources and enhancing consistency. While some software vendors and experimental researchers claim the tools can replace manual subject indexing, hard scientific evidence of their performance in operating information environments is scarce. A major reason for this is that research is usually conducted in laboratory conditions, excluding the complexities of real-life systems and situations. The paper reviews and discusses issues with existing evaluation approaches such as problems of aboutness and relevance assessments, implying the need to use more than a single “gold standard” method when evaluating indexing and retrieval and proposes a comprehensive evaluation framework. The framework is informed by a systematic review of the literature on indexing, classification and approaches: evaluating indexing quality directly through assessment by an evaluator or through comparison with a gold standard; evaluating the quality of computer-assisted indexing directly in the context of an indexing workflow, and evaluating indexing quality indirectly through analyzing retrieval performance

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Bridging the gap between social tagging and semantic annotation: E.D. the Entity Describer

Semantic annotation enables the development of efficient computational methods for analyzing and interacting with information, thus maximizing its value. With the already substantial and constantly expanding data generation capacity of the life sciences as well as the concomitant increase in the knowledge distributed in scientific articles, new ways to produce semantic annotations of this information are crucial. While automated techniques certainly facilitate the process, manual annotation remains the gold standard in most domains. In this manuscript, we describe a prototype mass-collaborative semantic annotation system that, by distributing the annotation workload across the broad community of biomedical researchers, may help to produce the volume of meaningful annotations needed by modern biomedical science. We present E.D., the Entity Describer, a mashup of the Connotea social tagging system, an index of semantic web-accessible controlled vocabularies, and a new public RDF database for storing social semantic annotations