523 research outputs found
Streaming Similarity Self-Join
We introduce and study the problem of computing the similarity self-join in a
streaming context (SSSJ), where the input is an unbounded stream of items
arriving continuously. The goal is to find all pairs of items in the stream
whose similarity is greater than a given threshold. The simplest formulation of
the problem requires unbounded memory, and thus, it is intractable. To make the
problem feasible, we introduce the notion of time-dependent similarity: the
similarity of two items decreases with the difference in their arrival time. By
leveraging the properties of this time-dependent similarity function, we design
two algorithmic frameworks to solve the sssj problem. The first one, MiniBatch
(MB), uses existing index-based filtering techniques for the static version of
the problem, and combines them in a pipeline. The second framework, Streaming
(STR), adds time filtering to the existing indexes, and integrates new
time-based bounds deeply in the working of the algorithms. We also introduce a
new indexing technique (L2), which is based on an existing state-of-the-art
indexing technique (L2AP), but is optimized for the streaming case. Extensive
experiments show that the STR algorithm, when instantiated with the L2 index,
is the most scalable option across a wide array of datasets and parameters
The Físchlár-News-Stories system: personalised access to an archive of TV news
The “Físchlár” systems are a family of tools for capturing, analysis, indexing, browsing, searching and summarisation of digital video information. Físchlár-News-Stories, described in this paper, is one of those systems, and provides access to a growing archive of broadcast TV news. Físchlár-News-Stories has several notable features including the fact that it automatically records TV news and segments a broadcast news program into stories, eliminating advertisements and credits at the start/end of the broadcast. Físchlár-News-Stories supports access to individual stories via calendar lookup, text search through closed captions, automatically-generated links between related stories, and personalised access using a personalisation and recommender system based on collaborative filtering. Access to individual news stories is supported either by browsing keyframes with synchronised closed captions, or by playback of the recorded video. One strength of the Físchlár-News-Stories system is that it is actually used, in practice, daily, to access news. Several aspects of the Físchlár systems have been published before, bit in this paper we give a summary of the Físchlár-News-Stories system in operation by following a scenario in which it is used and also outlining how the underlying system realises the functions it offers
Adaptive Representations for Tracking Breaking News on Twitter
Twitter is often the most up-to-date source for finding and tracking breaking
news stories. Therefore, there is considerable interest in developing filters
for tweet streams in order to track and summarize stories. This is a
non-trivial text analytics task as tweets are short, and standard retrieval
methods often fail as stories evolve over time. In this paper we examine the
effectiveness of adaptive mechanisms for tracking and summarizing breaking news
stories. We evaluate the effectiveness of these mechanisms on a number of
recent news events for which manually curated timelines are available.
Assessments based on ROUGE metrics indicate that an adaptive approaches are
best suited for tracking evolving stories on Twitter.Comment: 8 Pag
The Rightmost Equal-Cost Position Problem
LZ77-based compression schemes compress the input text by replacing factors
in the text with an encoded reference to a previous occurrence formed by the
couple (length, offset). For a given factor, the smallest is the offset, the
smallest is the resulting compression ratio. This is optimally achieved by
using the rightmost occurrence of a factor in the previous text. Given a cost
function, for instance the minimum number of bits used to represent an integer,
we define the Rightmost Equal-Cost Position (REP) problem as the problem of
finding one of the occurrences of a factor which cost is equal to the cost of
the rightmost one. We present the Multi-Layer Suffix Tree data structure that,
for a text of length n, at any time i, it provides REP(LPF) in constant time,
where LPF is the longest previous factor, i.e. the greedy phrase, a reference
to the list of REP({set of prefixes of LPF}) in constant time and REP(p) in
time O(|p| log log n) for any given pattern p
When resources collide: Towards a theory of coincidence in information spaces
This paper is an attempt to lay out foundations for a general theory of coincidence in information spaces such as the World Wide Web, expanding on existing work on bursty structures in document streams and information cascades. We elaborate on the hypothesis that every resource that is published in an information space, enters a temporary interaction with another resource once a unique explicit or implicit reference between the two is found. This thought is motivated by Erwin Shroedingers notion of entanglement between quantum systems. We present a generic information cascade model that exploits only the temporal order of information sharing activities, combined with inherent properties of the shared information resources. The approach was applied to data from the world's largest online citizen science platform Zooniverse and we report about findings of this case study
Database Learning: Toward a Database that Becomes Smarter Every Time
In today's databases, previous query answers rarely benefit answering future
queries. For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, we change this
paradigm in an approximate query processing (AQP) context. We make the
following observation: the answer to each query reveals some degree of
knowledge about the answer to another query because their answers stem from the
same underlying distribution that has produced the entire dataset. Exploiting
and refining this knowledge should allow us to answer queries more
analytically, rather than by reading enormous amounts of raw data. Also,
processing more queries should continuously enhance our knowledge of the
underlying distribution, and hence lead to increasingly faster response times
for future queries.
We call this novel idea---learning from past query answers---Database
Learning. We exploit the principle of maximum entropy to produce answers, which
are in expectation guaranteed to be more accurate than existing sample-based
approximations. Empowered by this idea, we build a query engine on top of Spark
SQL, called Verdict. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world query
traces from a large customer of a major database vendor. Our results
demonstrate that Verdict supports 73.7% of these queries, speeding them up by
up to 23.0x for the same accuracy level compared to existing AQP systems.Comment: This manuscript is an extended report of the work published in ACM
SIGMOD conference 201
Congenial Web Search : A Conceptual Framework for Personalized, Collaborative, and Social Peer-to-Peer Retrieval
Traditional information retrieval methods fail to address the fact that information consumption and production are social activities. Most Web search engines do not consider the social-cultural environment of users' information needs and the collaboration between users. This dissertation addresses a new search paradigm for Web information retrieval denoted as Congenial Web Search. It emphasizes personalization, collaboration, and socialization methods in order to improve effectiveness. The client-server architecture of Web search engines only allows the consumption of information. A peer-to-peer system architecture has been developed in this research to improve information seeking. Each user is involved in an interactive process to produce meta-information. Based on a personalization strategy on each peer, the user is supported to give explicit feedback for relevant documents. His information need is expressed by a query that is stored in a Peer Search Memory. On one hand, query-document associations are incorporated in a personalized ranking method for repeated information needs. The performance is shown in a known-item retrieval setting. On the other hand, explicit feedback of each user is useful to discover collaborative information needs. A new method for a controlled grouping of query terms, links, and users was developed to maintain Virtual Knowledge Communities. The quality of this grouping represents the effectiveness of grouped terms and links. Both strategies, personalization and collaboration, tackle the problem of a missing socialization among searchers. Finally, a concept for integrated information seeking was developed. This incorporates an integrated representation to improve effectiveness of information retrieval and information filtering. An integrated information retrieval process explores a virtual search network of Peer Search Memories in order to accomplish a reputation-based ranking. In addition, the community structure is considered by an integrated information filtering process. Both concepts have been evaluated and shown to have a better performance than traditional techniques. The methods presented in this dissertation offer the potential towards more transparency, and control of Web search
Pop Up Archive: Saving culturally significant audio through preservation, searchability, and distribution
Pop Up Archive is a set of web-based tools that make audio searchable and reusable for scholars, journalists, and the public through speech-to-text and keyword extraction software. Pop Up Archive unites audio recordings and voices from disparate places and eras, diving deep into our nation’s rich oral history. We seek to scale Pop Up Archive across U.S. recorded sound collections by implementing a transcription toolkit developed by the British Broadcasting Corporation, processing over 30,000 hours of digital sound from public media and oral history archives, and educating these communities on best practices for preserving and creating access to digital sound. Pop Up Archive is open source, conforms to archival standards, and requires no technical expertise of participating organizations. For the first time, digital sounds can be automatically searched to the timestamp, contextualized with topic headings, and indexed for safe and permanent backup preservation at the Internet Archive
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