CommAID: Visual Analytics for Communication Analysis through Interactive Dynamics Modeling

Communication consists of both meta-information as well as content. Currently, the automated analysis of such data often focuses either on the network aspects via social network analysis or on the content, utilizing methods from text-mining. However, the first category of approaches does not leverage the rich content information, while the latter ignores the conversation environment and the temporal evolution, as evident in the meta-information. In contradiction to communication research, which stresses the importance of a holistic approach, both aspects are rarely applied simultaneously, and consequently, their combination has not yet received enough attention in automated analysis systems. In this work, we aim to address this challenge by discussing the difficulties and design decisions of such a path as well as contribute CommAID, a blueprint for a holistic strategy to communication analysis. It features an integrated visual analytics design to analyze communication networks through dynamics modeling, semantic pattern retrieval, and a user-adaptable and problem-specific machine learning-based retrieval system. An interactive multi-level matrix-based visualization facilitates a focused analysis of both network and content using inline visuals supporting cross-checks and reducing context switches. We evaluate our approach in both a case study and through formative evaluation with eight law enforcement experts using a real-world communication corpus. Results show that our solution surpasses existing techniques in terms of integration level and applicability. With this contribution, we aim to pave the path for a more holistic approach to communication analysis.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, Computer Graphics Forum 2021 (pre-peer reviewed version

Adaptive content mapping for internet navigation

The Internet as the biggest human library ever assembled keeps on growing. Although all kinds of information carriers (e.g. audio/video/hybrid file formats) are available, text based documents dominate. It is estimated that about 80% of all information worldwide stored electronically exists in (or can be converted into) text form. More and more, all kinds of documents are generated by means of a text processing system and are therefore available electronically. Nowadays, many printed journals are also published online and may even discontinue to appear in print form tomorrow. This development has many convincing advantages: the documents are both available faster (cf. prepress services) and cheaper, they can be searched more easily, the physical storage only needs a fraction of the space previously necessary and the medium will not age. For most people, fast and easy access is the most interesting feature of the new age; computer-aided search for specific documents or Web pages becomes the basic tool for information-oriented work. But this tool has problems. The current keyword based search machines available on the Internet are not really appropriate for such a task; either there are (way) too many documents matching the specified keywords are presented or none at all. The problem lies in the fact that it is often very difficult to choose appropriate terms describing the desired topic in the first place. This contribution discusses the current state-of-the-art techniques in content-based searching (along with common visualization/browsing approaches) and proposes a particular adaptive solution for intuitive Internet document navigation, which not only enables the user to provide full texts instead of manually selected keywords (if available), but also allows him/her to explore the whole database

A Word Sense-Oriented User Interface for Interactive Multilingual Text Retrieval

In this paper we present an interface for supporting a user in an interactive cross-language search process using semantic classes. In order to enable users to access multilingual information, different problems have to be solved: disambiguating and translating the query words, as well as categorizing and presenting the results appropriately. Therefore, we first give a brief introduction to word sense disambiguation, cross-language text retrieval and document categorization and finally describe recent achievements of our research towards an interactive multilingual retrieval system. We focus especially on the problem of browsing and navigation of the different word senses in one source and possibly several target languages. In the last part of the paper, we discuss the developed user interface and its functionalities in more detail

Critically Examining the "Neural Hype": Weak Baselines and the Additivity of Effectiveness Gains from Neural Ranking Models

Is neural IR mostly hype? In a recent SIGIR Forum article, Lin expressed skepticism that neural ranking models were actually improving ad hoc retrieval effectiveness in limited data scenarios. He provided anecdotal evidence that authors of neural IR papers demonstrate "wins" by comparing against weak baselines. This paper provides a rigorous evaluation of those claims in two ways: First, we conducted a meta-analysis of papers that have reported experimental results on the TREC Robust04 test collection. We do not find evidence of an upward trend in effectiveness over time. In fact, the best reported results are from a decade ago and no recent neural approach comes close. Second, we applied five recent neural models to rerank the strong baselines that Lin used to make his arguments. A significant improvement was observed for one of the models, demonstrating additivity in gains. While there appears to be merit to neural IR approaches, at least some of the gains reported in the literature appear illusory.Comment: Published in the Proceedings of the 42nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2019

Visual exploration and retrieval of XML document collections with the generic system X2

This article reports on the XML retrieval system X2 which has been developed at the University of Munich over the last five years. In a typical session with X2, the user first browses a structural summary of the XML database in order to select interesting elements and keywords occurring in documents. Using this intermediate result, queries combining structure and textual references are composed semiautomatically. After query evaluation, the full set of answers is presented in a visual and structured way. X2 largely exploits the structure found in documents, queries and answers to enable new interactive visualization and exploration techniques that support mixed IR and database-oriented querying, thus bridging the gap between these three views on the data to be retrieved. Another salient characteristic of X2 which distinguishes it from other visual query systems for XML is that it supports various degrees of detailedness in the presentation of answers, as well as techniques for dynamically reordering and grouping retrieved elements once the complete answer set has been computed

A Semantic-Based Information Management System to Support Innovative Product Design

International competition and the rapidly global economy, unified by improved communication and transportation, offer to the consumers an enormous choice of goods and services. The result is that companies now require quality, value, time to market and innovation to be successful in order to win the increasing competition. In the engineering sector this is traduced in need of optimization of the design process and in maximization of re-use of data and knowledge already existing in the company. The “SIMI-Pro” (Semantic Information Management system for Innovative Product design) system addresses specific deficiencies in the conceptual phase of product design when knowledge management, if applied, is often sectorial. Its main contribution is in allowing easy, fast and centralized collection of data from multiple sources and in supporting the retrieval and re-use of a wide range of data that will help stylists and engineers shortening the production cycle. SIMI-Pro will be one of the first prototypes to base its information management and its knowledge sharing system on process ontology and it will demonstrate how the use of centralized network systems, coupled with Semantic Web technologies, can improve inter-working activities and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing

User-Centered Comparison of Web Search Tools

This study explores a user-centered approach to the comparative evaluation of the Web search tool ProThes against popular all-purpose search engines Yandex and Google. An original research design was developed. Data were collected from 12 volunteers who performed 48 search tasks in total. Main outcomes include: (1) search strategy supported through ProThes can be quite effective for focused Web search and (2) ProThes’ interface and system performance must be improved.The research was supported in part by the Russian Fund of Basic Research, grant # 03-07-90342