A semi-automated FAQ retrieval system for HIV/AIDS

This thesis describes a semi-automated FAQ retrieval system that can be queried by users through short text messages on low-end mobile phones to provide answers on HIV/AIDS related queries. First we address the issue of result presentation on low-end mobile phones by proposing an iterative interaction retrieval strategy where the user engages with the FAQ retrieval system in the question answering process. At each iteration, the system returns only one question-answer pair to the user and the iterative process terminates after the user's information need has been satisfied. Since the proposed system is iterative, this thesis attempts to reduce the number of iterations (search length) between the users and the system so that users do not abandon the search process before their information need has been satisfied. Moreover, we conducted a user study to determine the number of iterations that users are willing to tolerate before abandoning the iterative search process. We subsequently used the bad abandonment statistics from this study to develop an evaluation measure for estimating the probability that any random user will be satisfied when using our FAQ retrieval system. In addition, we used a query log and its click-through data to address three main FAQ document collection deficiency problems in order to improve the retrieval performance and the probability that any random user will be satisfied when using our FAQ retrieval system. Conclusions are derived concerning whether we can reduce the rate at which users abandon their search before their information need has been satisfied by using information from previous searches to: Address the term mismatch problem between the users' SMS queries and the relevant FAQ documents in the collection; to selectively rank the FAQ document according to how often they have been previously identified as relevant by users for a particular query term; and to identify those queries that do not have a relevant FAQ document in the collection. In particular, we proposed a novel template-based approach that uses queries from a query log for which the true relevant FAQ documents are known to enrich the FAQ documents with additional terms in order to alleviate the term mismatch problem. These terms are added as a separate field in a field-based model using two different proposed enrichment strategies, namely the Term Frequency and the Term Occurrence strategies. This thesis thoroughly investigates the effectiveness of the aforementioned FAQ document enrichment strategies using three different field-based models. Our findings suggest that we can improve the overall recall and the probability that any random user will be satisfied by enriching the FAQ documents with additional terms from queries in our query log. Moreover, our investigation suggests that it is important to use an FAQ document enrichment strategy that takes into consideration the number of times a term occurs in the query when enriching the FAQ documents. We subsequently show that our proposed enrichment approach for alleviating the term mismatch problem generalise well on other datasets. Through the evaluation of our proposed approach for selectively ranking the FAQ documents, we show that we can improve the retrieval performance and the probability that any random user will be satisfied when using our FAQ retrieval system by incorporating the click popularity score of a query term t on an FAQ document d into the scoring and ranking process. Our results generalised well on a new dataset. However, when we deploy the click popularity score of a query term t on an FAQ document d on an enriched FAQ document collection, we saw a decrease in the retrieval performance and the probability that any random user will be satisfied when using our FAQ retrieval system. Furthermore, we used our query log to build a binary classifier for detecting those queries that do not have a relevant FAQ document in the collection (Missing Content Queries (MCQs))). Before building such a classifier, we empirically evaluated several feature sets in order to determine the best combination of features for building a model that yields the best classification accuracy in identifying the MCQs and the non-MCQs. Using a different dataset, we show that we can improve the overall retrieval performance and the probability that any random user will be satisfied when using our FAQ retrieval system by deploying a MCQs detection subsystem in our FAQ retrieval system to filter out the MCQs. Finally, this thesis demonstrates that correcting spelling errors can help improve the retrieval performance and the probability that any random user will be satisfied when using our FAQ retrieval system. We tested our FAQ retrieval system with two different testing sets, one containing the original SMS queries and the other containing the SMS queries which were manually corrected for spelling errors. Our results show a significant improvement in the retrieval performance and the probability that any random user will be satisfied when using our FAQ retrieval system

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Case studies for developing globally responsible engineers

Document realitzat amb un ajut financer de la Unió Europea. Per poder accedir al material complementari per a docents dels 28 casos estudi que formen el llibre, activeu el "Document relacionat"Col·lecció de 28 casos estudi per a professors d'enginyeria: 1. Rural development and planning in LDCs: the “Gamba Deve – Licoma axis”,district of Caia, Mozambique 2. Reducing the impact of soil erosion and reservoir siltation on agricultural production and water availability: the case study of the Laaba catchment (Burkina Faso) 3. Trade and Mobility on the Rooftop of the World: Gravity Ropeways in Nepal 4. Sustainable Development of Agriculture and Food systems with regard to Water 5. Conservation agriculture: a complex avenue to conserve and improve soils 6. The national rural water supply and sanitation programme in Tanzania 7. Use of statistical tools in a development context. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) 8. Water supply system in Kojani Island (Zanzibar, Tanzania) 9. Faecal sludge management in Lusaka, Zambia 10. Water balance on the Central Rift Valley 11. Rural electrification in developing countries via autonomous micro-grids 12. Photovoltaics electrification in off-grid areas 13. Development of a MILP model to design wind-photovoltaic stand-alone electrification projects for isolated communities in developing countries 14. Estimation if indoor air pollution and health impacts due to biomass burning in rural Northern Ghana 15.Improved cookstoves assessment 16. Supporting the adoption of clean cookstoves and fuels: why won’t people adopt the perfect stove? 17. Do-it-yourself approach as appropriate technology for solar thermal system: the example of CDF Médina, Dakar (Senegal) 18. Essential oil extraction with concentrating solar thermal energy 19. Survival in the desert sun: cool food storage 20. Energy roadmap in Ghana and Botswana 21. Social & ethical issues in engineering 22. Radio communications systems in rural environments 23. A Diffserv transport network to bring 3G access to villages in the Amazon forest 24. Finding the poynting’s theorem in a health centre in San Pablo (Peru) 25. Tanzania, Water and health 26. Flood assessment and warning system 27. Technical aspects of municipal solid waste collection: case studies from East Africa 28. Plastic recyclingPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version