Recommender system for personalised travel itinerary

A recommender system is an approach to give an appropriate solu-tion to a particular problem. This helps in recognising the pattern or behaviour of a user to suggest future possible likes of the user. Nowa-days people like to travel during their spare time, it has become a rigid task to decide where to go. This paper represents a customised recommender system to help users in destining their itinerary. A model is designed to suggest the best places to visit in Rome. A questionnaire was prepared to get information about users interest during their travel. The model generates the best five places to visit with respect to the choice picked by the user. The top five places for each category will be displayed to the user and the user was asked to pick a starting point for the itinerary. Then the model generates another set off a filtered list of places to enhance their travel experi-ence. It includes displaying the top 5 restaurants to visit during their travel

Browse-to-search

This demonstration presents a novel interactive online shopping application based on visual search technologies. When users want to buy something on a shopping site, they usually have the requirement of looking for related information from other web sites. Therefore users need to switch between the web page being browsed and other websites that provide search results. The proposed application enables users to naturally search products of interest when they browse a web page, and make their even causal purchase intent easily satisfied. The interactive shopping experience is characterized by: 1) in session - it allows users to specify the purchase intent in the browsing session, instead of leaving the current page and navigating to other websites; 2) in context - -the browsed web page provides implicit context information which helps infer user purchase preferences; 3) in focus - users easily specify their search interest using gesture on touch devices and do not need to formulate queries in search box; 4) natural-gesture inputs and visual-based search provides users a natural shopping experience. The system is evaluated against a data set consisting of several millions commercial product images. © 2012 Authors

GEO-REFERENCED VIDEO RETRIEVAL: TEXT ANNOTATION AND SIMILARITY SEARCH

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Retrieval Enhancements for Task-Based Web Search

The task-based view of web search implies that retrieval should take the user perspective into account. Going beyond merely retrieving the most relevant result set for the current query, the retrieval system should aim to surface results that are actually useful to the task that motivated the query. This dissertation explores how retrieval systems can better understand and support their users’ tasks from three main angles: First, we study and quantify search engine user behavior during complex writing tasks, and how task success and behavior are associated in such settings. Second, we investigate search engine queries formulated as questions, and explore patterns in a large query log that may help search engines to better support this increasingly prevalent interaction pattern. Third, we propose a novel approach to reranking the search result lists produced by web search engines, taking into account retrieval axioms that formally specify properties of a good ranking.Die Task-basierte Sicht auf Websuche impliziert, dass die Benutzerperspektive berücksichtigt werden sollte. Über das bloße Abrufen der relevantesten Ergebnismenge für die aktuelle Anfrage hinaus, sollten Suchmaschinen Ergebnisse liefern, die tatsächlich für die Aufgabe (Task) nützlich sind, die diese Anfrage motiviert hat. Diese Dissertation untersucht, wie Retrieval-Systeme die Aufgaben ihrer Benutzer besser verstehen und unterstützen können, und leistet Forschungsbeiträge unter drei Hauptaspekten: Erstens untersuchen und quantifizieren wir das Verhalten von Suchmaschinenbenutzern während komplexer Schreibaufgaben, und wie Aufgabenerfolg und Verhalten in solchen Situationen zusammenhängen. Zweitens untersuchen wir Suchmaschinenanfragen, die als Fragen formuliert sind, und untersuchen ein Suchmaschinenlog mit fast einer Milliarde solcher Anfragen auf Muster, die Suchmaschinen dabei helfen können, diesen zunehmend verbreiteten Anfragentyp besser zu unterstützen. Drittens schlagen wir einen neuen Ansatz vor, um die von Web-Suchmaschinen erstellten Suchergebnislisten neu zu sortieren, wobei Retrieval-Axiome berücksichtigt werden, die die Eigenschaften eines guten Rankings formal beschreiben

Using Semantic-Based User Profile Modeling for Context-Aware Personalised Place Recommendations

Place Recommendation Systems (PRS's) are used to recommend places to visit to World Wide Web users. Existing PRS's are still limited by several problems, some of which are the problem of recommending similar set of places to different users (Lack of Personalization) and no diversity in the set of recommended items (Content Overspecialization). One of the main objectives in the PRS's or Contextual suggestion systems is to fill the semantic gap among the queries and suggestions and going beyond keywords matching. To address these issues, in this study we attempt to build a personalized context-aware place recommender system using semantic-based user profile modeling to address the limitations of current user profile building techniques and to improve the retrieval performance of personalized place recommender system. This approach consists of building a place ontology based on the Open Directory Project (ODP), a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing websites. We model a semantic user profile from the place concepts extracted from place ontology and weighted according to their semantic relatedness to user interests. The semantic user profile is then exploited to devise a personalized recommendation by re-ranking process of initial search results for improving retrieval performance. We evaluate this approach on dataset obtained using Google Paces API. Results show that our proposed approach significantly improves the retrieval performance compare to classic keyword-based place recommendation model

eWOM JA VERKKOARVOSTELUJEN HALLINNOINTI OSANA HOTELLIYRITYKSEN MARKKINOINTISTRATEGIAA JA OPERATIIVISTA TOIMINTAA

Sosiaalinen media on muuttanut yksittäisen kuluttajan valtaa vaikuttaa yrityksen maineeseen. Matkailualalla sosiaalisen median vaikutukset ovat suuret – matkailijat luottavat toisten matkailijoiden matkakertomuksiin, arvosteluihin ja arvioihin sekä tekevät ostopäätöksiä näiden arvioiden pohjalta. Aiempien tutkimusten mukaan hotellit voivat vaikuttaa matkailijoiden mielikuviin ottamalla osaa sosiaalisen median eri alustoilla ja kanavissa ilmenevään eWOM-keskusteluun. eWOM tulisi nähdä markkinoinnin strategisena osa-alueena maineenhallintaan, asiakasuskollisuuden ja asiakasymmärryksen luomiseen, myyntiin ja kohdennettuihin markkinointistrategioiden toteuttamiseen. eWOM:ia ilmenee erilaisilla matkailupalvelualustoilla ja verkkomatkanjärjestäjien kanavissa. Osa hotelleista reagoi asiakkaiden palautteisiin ja osa ei. Aiempien tutkimusten mukaan verkkoarvostelujen hallinnointi ja johtaminen ovat strategialähtöistä toimintaa, jota toteutetaan operatiivisella tasolla. Tässä tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan, miten eWOM näkyy hotellin markkinointistrategiassa, miten verkkoarvosteluja hallinnoidaan operatiivisesti ja miten arvosteluista saatua tietoa hyödynnetään käytännössä. Tutkimus toteutettiin monitapaustutkimuksena. Tapausyrityksinä on neljä erilaista hotellia, jotka edustavat kansainvälistä, suurta kotimaista ja pientä kotimaista hotellibrändiä. Kaikki hotellit vastaavat asiakaspalautteisiin TripAdvisor-alustalla ja sijaitsevat Varsinais-Suomessa. Haastateltavina olivat hotellien hotellipäälliköt sekä markkinointipäällikkö tai myynti- ja markkinointijohtaja. Haastattelut toteutettiin tammi–helmikuussa 2018. Haastatteluiden perusteella voidaan sanoa, että hotellien markkinointistrategioiden keskiössä on asiakaskokemuksen kehittäminen etenkin erilaisten digitaalisten web- ja mobiilisovellusten avulla. eWOM huomioitiin hotellien markkinointistrategioissa erilaisina sosiaalisen median kanavaratkaisuina sekä erilaisina tapoina hallita ja johtaa verkkoarvosteluja. Verkkoarvosteluiden hallinnointi ja johtaminen on hotellien operatiivisen tason tehtävä, jota ohjaavat strategiset päätökset käytettävissä olevista resursseista sekä päätökset siitä, kuinka laajasti asiakkaita palvellaan sosiaalisessa mediassa. Hotellibrändin asiakaslupaus ohjaa eWOM:in hallinnan ja johtamisen laajuutta sekä sen strategista merkitystä. Verkkoarvosteluista saatavaa tietoa hyödynnetään operatiivisella tasolla muun muassa palveluvirheiden korjaamiseksi, asiakaspalvelun kehittämisessä ja henkilökunnan kouluttamisessa ja motivoinnissa. Verkkoarvosteluista saadun tiedon hyödyntäminen strategisella tasolla on vähäisempää ja sitä pyritään kehittämään

Leveraging Semantic Annotations for Event-focused Search & Summarization

Today in this Big Data era, overwhelming amounts of textual information across different sources with a high degree of redundancy has made it hard for a consumer to retrospect on past events. A plausible solution is to link semantically similar information contained across the different sources to enforce a structure thereby providing multiple access paths to relevant information. Keeping this larger goal in view, this work uses Wikipedia and online news articles as two prominent yet disparate information sources to address the following three problems: • We address a linking problem to connect Wikipedia excerpts to news articles by casting it into an IR task. Our novel approach integrates time, geolocations, and entities with text to identify relevant documents that can be linked to a given excerpt. • We address an unsupervised extractive multi-document summarization task to generate a fixed-length event digest that facilitates efficient consumption of information contained within a large set of documents. Our novel approach proposes an ILP for global inference across text, time, geolocations, and entities associated with the event. • To estimate temporal focus of short event descriptions, we present a semi-supervised approach that leverages redundancy within a longitudinal news collection to estimate accurate probabilistic time models. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and viability of our proposed approaches towards achieving the larger goal.Im heutigen Big Data Zeitalters existieren überwältigende Mengen an Textinformationen, die über mehrere Quellen verteilt sind und ein hohes Maß an Redundanz haben. Durch diese Gegebenheiten ist eine Retroperspektive auf vergangene Ereignisse für Konsumenten nur schwer möglich. Eine plausible Lösung ist die Verknüpfung semantisch ähnlicher, aber über mehrere Quellen verteilter Informationen, um dadurch eine Struktur zu erzwingen, die mehrere Zugriffspfade auf relevante Informationen, bietet. Vor diesem Hintergrund benutzt diese Dissertation Wikipedia und Onlinenachrichten als zwei prominente, aber dennoch grundverschiedene Informationsquellen, um die folgenden drei Probleme anzusprechen: • Wir adressieren ein Verknüpfungsproblem, um Wikipedia-Auszüge mit Nachrichtenartikeln zu verbinden und das Problem in eine Information-Retrieval-Aufgabe umzuwandeln. Unser neuartiger Ansatz integriert Zeit- und Geobezüge sowie Entitäten mit Text, um relevante Dokumente, die mit einem gegebenen Auszug verknüpft werden können, zu identifizieren. • Wir befassen uns mit einer unüberwachten Extraktionsmethode zur automatischen Zusammenfassung von Texten aus mehreren Dokumenten um Ereigniszusammenfassungen mit fester Länge zu generieren, was eine effiziente Aufnahme von Informationen aus großen Dokumentenmassen ermöglicht. Unser neuartiger Ansatz schlägt eine ganzzahlige lineare Optimierungslösung vor, die globale Inferenzen über Text, Zeit, Geolokationen und mit Ereignis-verbundenen Entitäten zieht. • Um den zeitlichen Fokus kurzer Ereignisbeschreibungen abzuschätzen, stellen wir einen semi-überwachten Ansatz vor, der die Redundanz innerhalb einer langzeitigen Dokumentensammlung ausnutzt, um genaue probabilistische Zeitmodelle abzuschätzen. Umfangreiche experimentelle Auswertungen zeigen die Wirksamkeit und Tragfähigkeit unserer vorgeschlagenen Ansätze zur Erreichung des größeren Ziels

Providing effective memory retrieval cues through automatic structuring and augmentation of a lifelog of images

Lifelogging is an area of research which is concerned with the capture of many aspects of an individual's life digitally, and within this rapidly emerging field is the significant challenge of managing images passively captured by an individual of their daily life. Possible applications vary from helping those with neurodegenerative conditions recall events from memory, to the maintenance and augmentation of extensive image collections of a tourist's trips. However, a large lifelog of images can quickly amass, with an average of 700,000 images captured each year, using a device such as the SenseCam. We address the problem of managing this vast collection of personal images by investigating automatic techniques that: 1. Identify distinct events within a full day of lifelog images (which typically consists of 2,000 images) e.g. breakfast, working on PC, meeting, etc. 2. Find similar events to a given event in a person's lifelog e.g. "show me other events where I was in the park" 3. Determine those events that are more important or unusual to the user and also select a relevant keyframe image for visual display of an event e.g. a "meeting" is more interesting to review than "working on PC" 4. Augment the images from a wearable camera with higher quality images from external "Web 2.0" sources e.g. find me pictures taken by others of the U2 concert in Croke Park In this dissertation we discuss novel techniques to realise each of these facets and how effective they are. The significance of this work is not only of benefit to the lifelogging community, but also to cognitive psychology researchers studying the potential benefits of lifelogging devices to those with neurodegenerative diseases

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018 : 10-12 December 2018, Torino

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges