Realistic electronic books

People like books. They are convenient and can be accessed easily and enjoyably. In contrast, many view the experience of accessing and exploring electronic documents as dull, cumbersome and disorientating. This thesis claims that modelling digital documents as physical books can significantly improve reading performance. To investigate this claim, a realistic electronic book model was developed and evaluated. In this model, a range of properties associated with physical books---analogue page turning, bookmarks and annotations---are emulated. Advantage is also taken of the digital environment by supporting hyperlinks, multimedia, full-text search over terms and synonyms, automatically cross referencing documents with an online encyclopaedia, and producing a back-of-the-book index. The main technical challenge of simulating physical books is finding a suitable technique for page turning that is sufficiently realistic, yet lightweight, responsive, scalable and accessible. Several techniques were surveyed, implemented and evaluated. The chosen technique allows realistic books to be presented in the Adobe Flash Player, the most widely used browser plug-in on the Web. A series of usability studies were conducted to compare reading performance while performing various tasks with HTML, PDF, physical books, and simulated books. They revealed that participants not only preferred the new interface, but completed the tasks more efficiently, without any loss in accuracy

Grounding event references in news

Events are frequently discussed in natural language, and their accurate identification is central to language understanding. Yet they are diverse and complex in ontology and reference; computational processing hence proves challenging. News provides a shared basis for communication by reporting events. We perform several studies into news event reference. One annotation study characterises each news report in terms of its update and topic events, but finds that topic is better consider through explicit references to background events. In this context, we propose the event linking task which—analogous to named entity linking or disambiguation—models the grounding of references to notable events. It defines the disambiguation of an event reference as a link to the archival article that first reports it. When two references are linked to the same article, they need not be references to the same event. Event linking hopes to provide an intuitive approximation to coreference, erring on the side of over-generation in contrast with the literature. The task is also distinguished in considering event references from multiple perspectives over time. We diagnostically evaluate the task by first linking references to past, newsworthy events in news and opinion pieces to an archive of the Sydney Morning Herald. The intensive annotation results in only a small corpus of 229 distinct links. However, we observe that a number of hyperlinks targeting online news correspond to event links. We thus acquire two large corpora of hyperlinks at very low cost. From these we learn weights for temporal and term overlap features in a retrieval system. These noisy data lead to significant performance gains over a bag-of-words baseline. While our initial system can accurately predict many event links, most will require deep linguistic processing for their disambiguation

How to improve collaborative learning with video tools in the classroom? Social vs. cognitive guidance for student teams

Digital video technologies offer a variety of functions for supporting collaborative learning in classrooms. Yet, for novice learners, such as school students, positive learning outcomes also depend centrally on effective social interactions. We present empirical evidence for the positive effects of instructive guidance on performance and on learning of students who use web-based video tools during a short collaborative-design task in their history lesson. In an experiment with 16-year old learners (N = 148) working on a history topic, we compared two contrasting types of guidance for student teams' collaboration processes (social-interaction-related vs. cognitive-task-related guidance). We also compared two types of advanced video tools. Both types of guidance and tools were aimed at supporting students' active, meaningful learning and critical analysis of a historical newsreel. Results indicated that social-interaction-related guidance was more effective in terms of learning outcomes (e.g., the students' history skills) than cognitive-task-related guidance. The different tools did not yield consistent results. The implications of these findings are discusse

Grounding event references in news

Events are frequently discussed in natural language, and their accurate identification is central to language understanding. Yet they are diverse and complex in ontology and reference; computational processing hence proves challenging. News provides a shared basis for communication by reporting events. We perform several studies into news event reference. One annotation study characterises each news report in terms of its update and topic events, but finds that topic is better consider through explicit references to background events. In this context, we propose the event linking task which—analogous to named entity linking or disambiguation—models the grounding of references to notable events. It defines the disambiguation of an event reference as a link to the archival article that first reports it. When two references are linked to the same article, they need not be references to the same event. Event linking hopes to provide an intuitive approximation to coreference, erring on the side of over-generation in contrast with the literature. The task is also distinguished in considering event references from multiple perspectives over time. We diagnostically evaluate the task by first linking references to past, newsworthy events in news and opinion pieces to an archive of the Sydney Morning Herald. The intensive annotation results in only a small corpus of 229 distinct links. However, we observe that a number of hyperlinks targeting online news correspond to event links. We thus acquire two large corpora of hyperlinks at very low cost. From these we learn weights for temporal and term overlap features in a retrieval system. These noisy data lead to significant performance gains over a bag-of-words baseline. While our initial system can accurately predict many event links, most will require deep linguistic processing for their disambiguation

Comment-oriented blog summarization by sentence extraction

Much existing research on blogs focused on posts only, ignoring their comments. Our user study conducted on summarizing blog posts, however, showed that reading comments does change one’s understanding about blog posts. In this research, we aim to extract representative sentences from ablogpostthatbestrepresentthetopicsdiscussedamong its comments. The proposed solution first derives representative words from comments and then selects sentences containing representative words. The representativeness of words is measured using ReQuT (i.e., Reader, Quotation, and Topic). Evaluated on human labeled sentences, ReQuT together with summation-based sentence selection showed promising results

Supporting Organisational Critical Activities From Web Sites: An Evaluation Methodology Development

quot; Organisational critical activities quot; (OCAs) are activities which must be conducted by the organisation constantly in order to be successful in the industry. They are recognised as being essential to short, medium, and long-term success in that industry, have been significantly resourced and receive regular senior management monitoring and direction. Although these activities are extremely important, some empirical studies have shown that they are not well supported by organisations, particularly in the area of Web support. This thesis develops an evaluation methodology called the quot;organisational critical activity Web support evaluation methodology quot; (OCAWSEM) which can be utilised to elicit OCAs from organisations, evaluate whether an organisation acutes; OCAs are being supported by its Web site, and provide guidance on how the organisation can improve its Web site. To develop the OCAWSEM, this thesis reviews the relevant literature and proposes a prototype OCAWSEM. A new iterative case design (ICD) approach has been used in order to further develop the prototype, and then to test the improved OCAWSEM. The selected field cases were eight universities in New Zealand. In total, 43 semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior teams, middle level managers, and Web teams. A systematic review of these universitiesacute Web sites was performed from the provideracutes, rather than the useracutes perspective. The outcome shows that the Developed OCAWSEM is a valid and reliable methodology for the evaluation of the support for OCAs from Web sites in the universities in New Zealand. This thesis provides useful lessons, drawn from the development and testing processes, as the basis from which to develop more specific OCAWSEMs for use in other organisational and industry contexts. Both practitioners and academicians can gain a deeper understanding of the notion of OCAs, better elicit OCAs from management, conduct Web site evaluations, and discuss the support of the Web sites for the OCAs

Interactive Information Retrieval with Structured Documents

In recent years there has been a growing realisation in the IR community that the interaction of searchers with information is an indispensable component of the IR process. As a result, issues relating to interactive IR have been extensively investigated in the last decade. This research has been performed in the context of unstructured documents or in the context of the loosely-defined structure encountered in web pages. XML documents, on the other hand, define a different context, by offering the possibility of navigating within the structure of a single document, or of following links to other documents. Relatively little work has been carried out to study user interaction with IR systems that make use of the additional features offered by XML documents. As part of the INEX initiative for the evaluation of XML retrieval, the INEX interactive track has focused on interactive XML retrieval since 2004. Here user friendly exposition to various features of XML documents is provided and some new features are designed and implemented to enable searchers to have access to their desired information in an efficient manner. In this study interaction entails three levels: query formulation, inspecting result list, and examining the detail. For query formulation, suggesting related terms is a conventional method to assist searchers. Here we investigate the related terms derived from two different co-occurrence units: elements and documents. In addition, contextual aspect is added to facilitate the searchers for appropriate selection of terms. Results showed the usefulness of suggesting related terms and some what acceptance of the contextual related tool. For inspecting the result list, classic document retrieval systems such as web search engines retrieve whole documents, and leave it to the searchers to collect their required information from possibly a lengthy text. In contrast, element retrieval aims at a focused view of information by pointing to the optimal access points of the document. A number of strategies have been investigated for presenting result lists. For examining the detail of a document, traditionally the complete document is presented to a searcher and here again the searcher has to put in effort to reach its required information. We investigated the use of additional support such as a table of contents along with document detail. In addition, we also investigated graphical representations of documents depicting its structure and granularity of retrieved elements along with their estimated relevance. Here the table of contents was found to be a very useful features for examining details. In order to conduct the analysis of searcher's interaction, a visualisation technique based on Tree Map was developed. It depicts the search interaction with element retrieval system. A number of browsing strategies has been identified with the help of this tool. The value of element retrieval for searchers and comparison between two focused approaches such as element and passage retrieval system was also evaluated. The study suggests that searchers find elements useful for their tasks and they locate a lot of the relevant information in specific elements rather than full documents. Sections, in particular, appear to be helpful. In order to provide user-specific support, the system needs feedback from searchers, who in turn, are very reluctant to give this information explicitly. Therefore, we investigated to what extent the different features can be used as relevance predictors. Of the five features regarded, primarily the reading time is a useful relevance predictor. Overall, relevance predictors for structured documents seem to be much weaker than for the case of atomic documents

Digital Explanatory Annotations for Literary Texts: Possibilities - Practices - Problems - Prospects

This thesis is concerned with digital explanatory annotations that are meant to help readers understand, interpret, and enjoy literary texts. The first chapter outlines the advantages of digital over printed annotations. The second chapter evaluates the annotations in eleven digital editions. The focus lies on their extent and systematization, their layout, their use of links and multimedia elements, their citeability, and on whether they were created collaboratively or not. The third chapter is concerned with TEASys – a system developed at the university of Tübingen which helps annotators structure their explanations with regards to length/depth and content. This system allows readers to choose which parts of an annotation they want to read for their individual interests and research purposes. The fourth chapter discusses the results of a survey concerned with students’ attitudes towards digital reading and digital annotations. The last chapter outlines three challenges that digital annotations are still facing: (1) readers’ preference for printed texts (2) the questions how the academic quality of collaboratively written annotations can be guaranteed, and (3) the question how digital annotations that are constantly being revised can be archived.This version of the MA thesis contains minor revisions (e.g. corrections of misspellings and line breaks).Revised version published in January 2021: http://hdl.handle.net/10900/11199

RECONTEXTUALIZING METATEXTUAL KNOWLEDGE AND TEXT STRUCTURE FEATURES IN SELF-REGULATED LEARNING AND ONLINE COMPREHENSION

Despite advanced and evolving research on the complex strategic decision-making demanded of successful online 21st century learners, many individuals lack requisite knowledge and skills to enact effective strategies, to make inferences, or to engage in self-testing. Researchers across theories and disciplines (e.g., New Literacies, Educational Psychology, and Multiple Source Use) have captured the complex intersection of cognition, metacognition, and motivation associated with learning online. Notably, few researchers have integrated traditional literacy elements related to the structure and function of texts with research on online learning. In particular, there is a need to integrate self-regulated learning literature with research on metatextual knowledge and knowledge of text types and structural features, within online learning environments. In this study, I applied think-aloud protocol data analysis to examine how metatextual knowledge and self-regulated learning processes related to online comprehension. Using 53 university participants, I explored the following: what kinds of metatextual knowledge were displayed during a complex online science task, the relationship between metatextual knowledge and learning gain, and how self-regulated learning processing varied across text types (e.g., argumentation, refutation). Results indicated the following: (a) learners enacted different processes related to structural and organizational functions of text (b) frequency of use of bold headings statistically significantly related to learning, and (c) a combination of metatextual variables, such as using headings to determine the expectation of the adequacy of content, and noticing lists, statistically significantly related to learning. Further, participants statistically significantly differed in their frequency of self-regulated learning processes (e.g., planning, monitoring, and strategy use) across different text types. Findings from this study align with previous traditional literacy research showing the awareness of structural components of text types related to learners’ ability to organize information into main ideas that aid comprehension (Akhondi, Malayeri, & Samad, 2011; Dymock, 2000; Roehling, Hebert, Nelson, & Bohaty, 2017; Wijeckumar, Meyer & Rei, 2012), retention, and recall (Richgels, McGee, Lomax & Shield, 1987). Results implicated potential avenues for more research, including continued exploration of self-regulated learning processes and strategies related to different text types and structural components of online learning. In addition, this study further illustrated the utility of think-aloud protocols as an approach to understanding self-regulated learning in context.Doctor of Educatio