Design of a specialized search engine for university students dedicated to education and environment

The aim of this study is to introduce a new specialized search engine that helps university students learn about environmental issues and improve their environmental literacy. Our search engine collects information from environmental documents and scientific articles from trusted sources. After intensive word processing, it provides a list of different contexts for the terms queried, depending on the chosen field, allowing students to refine their online search. In a single operation, students can find phrases and paragraphs using multiple related terms. This model aims to generate maximum output with semantic value using minimum user input, thanks to the new search mechanism on which it is based. The search engine is optimized for environmental education, allowing students to access environmental information in their preferred language. Our work is structured as follows: first, we motivate the need for a specialized environmental education search engine. Then, we discuss the context and construction of our specialized search engine for environmental education. Finally, we review the proposed solution and conclude with future work

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

Requirements Specification for a web application

This research is part of a software development project that aims to improve an existing web-based business application that is used to access engine technical data per different engine types. The need for a completely new application and development project has occurred, because the organization’s business has evolved and emerged new requirements that go beyond the maintenance of the existing system as the currently used technology is outdated and does no longer support the needed changes. The main intention of this research is to provide a requirements specification for the new improved application, including both the functional and non-functional requirements. Other objectives include giving recommendations for the continuation of the project as well as proposing the technologies and tools to be used in the actual implementation. The research was divided into theoretical and empirical research. In the theoretical part the theory behind the web applications and software engineering were explored, concentrating more in detail on the requirements engineering activity. In the empirical part, the existing application was first inspected, and then the detailed research design was made and executed. In practice, the different stakeholders for the application were identified, and requirements were discovered by utilizing conversational interviews in combination with early prototyping. As a result, the requirements in their raw form were discovered, and finally turned in to the final requirements specification through analysis, representation and validation. Last, the recommendations for the project’s continuation were given. As a main result of this research, a requirements specification for the new enhanced web application was established. The produced specification gives both the functional and non-functional requirements in a prioritized and organized natural language form, but also includes the produced user interface mock-up prototype to provide more visual representation to easy the communication between the different stakeholders. In addition, the research gives recommendations for the web technologies and tools to be used in the implementation of the software, and provides suggestions for the continuation of the development project. Overall, the results will work as an input for the following development activities and give a good base for the project to proceed.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

How can start-ups increase their value co-creation through SEO?

Abstract. The internet started in the 1960s for government researchers to exchange research. Tim Berners Lee created the foundation for the web in 1990, which consisted of the HTTP protocol, a browser, a server, and the world’s first website. Netscape, an early web browser, had a very successful IPO in 1995, which ultimately popularized the web and sparked the so-called “Dot Com bubble.” The World Wide Web, since its creation until now, has become a critical channel between companies and customers. Over half of the internet starts their search on a search engine, making it imperative for companies that want to stay competitive to have a website online. Ever since the commercialization of the internet, startup companies have competed for the first search results in search engines through a digital marketing technique known as Search Engine Optimization. SEO as a study topic has been studied since Google was created in 1998. This thesis explores how value co-creation is created with Search Engine Optimization and how the two concepts are related. The context is for high-growth start-up companies that aim to increase their digital presence online. The research method is qualitative dominant and takes an abductive approach. The primary data was collected from a young startup company in North America and consisted of an extensive data set of user behavior. The data consisted of screen recordings of the users and user metrics collected through a tracking script on the website. The secondary data used takes the form of peer-reviewed articles, previous SEO studies, online articles, and books. Search Engine Optimization was found to enable companies that want to increase their value co-creation based on the data. It was shown to have the capacity to boost their online presence, create more opportunities for value co-creation, and provide an insight into any blockages preventing co-creation. Essentially, SEO was found to be a vehicle to drive users to companies’ websites and increase the chances for the company to engage the user with a value proposition that could later turn into value-creation. The data also revealed that companies could choose to become co-creators in value if they choose to do so. This was a contrary finding to the pre-existing theory

Combining granularity-based topic-dependent and topic-independent evidences for opinion detection

Fouille des opinion, une sous-discipline dans la recherche d'information (IR) et la linguistique computationnelle, fait référence aux techniques de calcul pour l'extraction, la classification, la compréhension et l'évaluation des opinions exprimées par diverses sources de nouvelles en ligne, social commentaires des médias, et tout autre contenu généré par l'utilisateur. Il est également connu par de nombreux autres termes comme trouver l'opinion, la détection d'opinion, l'analyse des sentiments, la classification sentiment, de détection de polarité, etc. Définition dans le contexte plus spécifique et plus simple, fouille des opinion est la tâche de récupération des opinions contre son besoin aussi exprimé par l'utilisateur sous la forme d'une requête. Il y a de nombreux problèmes et défis liés à l'activité fouille des opinion. Dans cette thèse, nous nous concentrons sur quelques problèmes d'analyse d'opinion. L'un des défis majeurs de fouille des opinion est de trouver des opinions concernant spécifiquement le sujet donné (requête). Un document peut contenir des informations sur de nombreux sujets à la fois et il est possible qu'elle contienne opiniâtre texte sur chacun des sujet ou sur seulement quelques-uns. Par conséquent, il devient très important de choisir les segments du document pertinentes à sujet avec leurs opinions correspondantes. Nous abordons ce problème sur deux niveaux de granularité, des phrases et des passages. Dans notre première approche de niveau de phrase, nous utilisons des relations sémantiques de WordNet pour trouver cette association entre sujet et opinion. Dans notre deuxième approche pour le niveau de passage, nous utilisons plus robuste modèle de RI i.e. la language modèle de se concentrer sur ce problème. L'idée de base derrière les deux contributions pour l'association d'opinion-sujet est que si un document contient plus segments textuels (phrases ou passages) opiniâtre et pertinentes à sujet, il est plus opiniâtre qu'un document avec moins segments textuels opiniâtre et pertinentes. La plupart des approches d'apprentissage-machine basée à fouille des opinion sont dépendants du domaine i.e. leurs performances varient d'un domaine à d'autre. D'autre part, une approche indépendant de domaine ou un sujet est plus généralisée et peut maintenir son efficacité dans différents domaines. Cependant, les approches indépendant de domaine souffrent de mauvaises performances en général. C'est un grand défi dans le domaine de fouille des opinion à développer une approche qui est plus efficace et généralisé. Nos contributions de cette thèse incluent le développement d'une approche qui utilise de simples fonctions heuristiques pour trouver des documents opiniâtre. Fouille des opinion basée entité devient très populaire parmi les chercheurs de la communauté IR. Il vise à identifier les entités pertinentes pour un sujet donné et d'en extraire les opinions qui leur sont associées à partir d'un ensemble de documents textuels. Toutefois, l'identification et la détermination de la pertinence des entités est déjà une tâche difficile. Nous proposons un système qui prend en compte à la fois l'information de l'article de nouvelles en cours ainsi que des articles antérieurs pertinents afin de détecter les entités les plus importantes dans les nouvelles actuelles. En plus de cela, nous présentons également notre cadre d'analyse d'opinion et tâches relieés. Ce cadre est basée sur les évidences contents et les évidences sociales de la blogosphère pour les tâches de trouver des opinions, de prévision et d'avis de classement multidimensionnel. Cette contribution d'prématurée pose les bases pour nos travaux futurs. L'évaluation de nos méthodes comprennent l'utilisation de TREC 2006 Blog collection et de TREC Novelty track 2004 collection. La plupart des évaluations ont été réalisées dans le cadre de TREC Blog track.Opinion mining is a sub-discipline within Information Retrieval (IR) and Computational Linguistics. It refers to the computational techniques for extracting, classifying, understanding, and assessing the opinions expressed in various online sources like news articles, social media comments, and other user-generated content. It is also known by many other terms like opinion finding, opinion detection, sentiment analysis, sentiment classification, polarity detection, etc. Defining in more specific and simpler context, opinion mining is the task of retrieving opinions on an issue as expressed by the user in the form of a query. There are many problems and challenges associated with the field of opinion mining. In this thesis, we focus on some major problems of opinion mining

SNP based literature and data retrieval

>Magister Scientiae - MScReference single nucleotide polymorphism (refSNP) identifiers are used to earmark SNPs in the human genome. These identifiers are often found in variant call format (VCF) files. RefSNPs can be useful to include as terms submitted to search engines when sourcing biomedical literature. In this thesis, the development of a bioinformatics software package is motivated, planned and implemented as a web application (http://sniphunter.sanbi.ac.za) with an application programming interface (API). The purpose is to allow scientists searching for relevant literature to query a database using refSNP identifiers and potential keywords assigned to scientific literature by the authors. Multiple queries can be simultaneously launched using either the web interface or the API. In addition, a VCF file parser was developed and packaged with the application to allow users to upload, extract and write information from VCF files to a file format that can be interpreted by the novel search engine created during this project. The parsing feature is seamlessly integrated with the web application's user interface, meaning there is no expectation on the user to learn a scripting language. This multi-faceted software system, called SNiPhunter, envisions saving researchers time during life sciences literature procurement, by suggesting articles based on the amount of times a reference SNP identifier has been mentioned in an article. This will allow the user to make a quantitative estimate as to the relevance of an article. A second novel feature is the inclusion of the email address of a correspondence author in the results returned to the user, which promotes communication between scientists. Moreover, links to external functional information are provided to allow researchers to examine annotations associated with their reference SNP identifier of interest. Standard information such as digital object identifiers and publishing dates, that are typically provided by other search engines, are also included in the results returned to the user.National Research Foundation (NRF) /The South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI

Multi-Thread Retrieval Approach to a Relational Multi-Database System

Department of Computer Scienc

Enhanced web-based summary generation for search.

After a user types in a search query on a major search engine, they are presented with a number of search results. Each search result is made up of a title, brief text summary and a URL. It is then the user\u27s job to select documents for further review. Our research aims to improve the accuracy of users selecting relevant documents by improving the way these web pages are summarized. Improvements in accuracy will lead to time improvements and user experience improvements. We propose ReClose, a system for generating web document summaries. ReClose generates summary content through combining summarization techniques from query-biased and query-independent summary generation. Query-biased summaries generally provide query terms in context. Query-independent summaries focus on summarizing documents as a whole. Combining these summary techniques led to a 10% improvement in user decision making over Google generated summaries. Color-coded ReClose summaries provide keyword usage depth at a glance and also alert users to topic departures. Color-coding further enhanced ReClose results and led to a 20% improvement in user decision making over Google generated summaries. Many online documents include structure and multimedia of various forms such as tables, lists, forms and images. We propose to include this structure in web page summaries. We found that the expert user was insignificantly slowed in decision making while the majority of average users made decisions more quickly using summaries including structure without any decrease in decision accuracy. We additionally extended ReClose for use in summarizing large numbers of tweets in tracking flu outbreaks in social media. The resulting summaries have variable length and are effective at summarizing flu related trends. Users of the system obtained an accuracy of 0.86 labeling multi-tweet summaries. This showed that the basis of ReClose is effective outside of web documents and that variable length summaries can be more effective than fixed length. Overall the ReClose system provides unique summaries that contain more informative content than current search engines produce, highlight the results in a more meaningful way, and add structure when meaningful. The applications of ReClose extend far beyond search and have been demonstrated in summarizing pools of tweets