Knowledge Engineering in Search Engines

With large amounts of information being exchanged on the Internet, search engines have become the most popular tools for helping users to search and filter this information. However, keyword-based search engines sometimes obtain information, which does not meet user’ needs. Some of them are even irrelevant to what the user queries. When the users get query results, they have to read and organize them by themselves. It is not easy for users to handle information when a search engine returns several million results. This project uses a granular computing approach to find knowledge structures of a search engine. The project focuses on knowledge engineering components of a search engine. Based on the earlier work of Dr. Lin and his former student [1], it represents concepts in the Web by simplicial complexes. We found that to represent simplicial complexes adequately, we only need the maximal simplexes. Therefore, this project focuses on building maximal simplexes. Since it is too costly to analyze all Web pages or documents, the project uses the sampling method to get sampling documents. The project constructs simplexes of documents and uses the simplexes to find maximal simplexes. These maximal simplexes are regarded as primitive concepts that can represent Web pages or documents. The maximal simplexes can be used to build an index of a search engine in the future

Entropy and Graph Based Modelling of Document Coherence using Discourse Entities: An Application

We present two novel models of document coherence and their application to information retrieval (IR). Both models approximate document coherence using discourse entities, e.g. the subject or object of a sentence. Our first model views text as a Markov process generating sequences of discourse entities (entity n-grams); we use the entropy of these entity n-grams to approximate the rate at which new information appears in text, reasoning that as more new words appear, the topic increasingly drifts and text coherence decreases. Our second model extends the work of Guinaudeau & Strube [28] that represents text as a graph of discourse entities, linked by different relations, such as their distance or adjacency in text. We use several graph topology metrics to approximate different aspects of the discourse flow that can indicate coherence, such as the average clustering or betweenness of discourse entities in text. Experiments with several instantiations of these models show that: (i) our models perform on a par with two other well-known models of text coherence even without any parameter tuning, and (ii) reranking retrieval results according to their coherence scores gives notable performance gains, confirming a relation between document coherence and relevance. This work contributes two novel models of document coherence, the application of which to IR complements recent work in the integration of document cohesiveness or comprehensibility to ranking [5, 56]

Argumentative zoning information extraction from scientific text

Let me tell you, writing a thesis is not always a barrel of laughs—and strange things can happen, too. For example, at the height of my thesis paranoia, I had a re-current dream in which my cat Amy gave me detailed advice on how to restructure the thesis chapters, which was awfully nice of her. But I also had a lot of human help throughout this time, whether things were going fine or beserk. Most of all, I want to thank Marc Moens: I could not have had a better or more knowledgable supervisor. He always took time for me, however busy he might have been, reading chapters thoroughly in two days. He both had the calmness of mind to give me lots of freedom in research, and the right judgement to guide me away, tactfully but determinedly, from the occasional catastrophe or other waiting along the way. He was great fun to work with and also became a good friend. My work has profitted from the interdisciplinary, interactive and enlightened atmosphere at the Human Communication Centre and the Centre for Cognitive Science (which is now called something else). The Language Technology Group was a great place to work in, as my research was grounded in practical applications develope

Annotation of Children's Oral Narrations: Modeling Emergent Narrative Skills for Computational Applications

We present an annotation method for developing a model of children’s comprehension that differentiates between their recall for the objective content of a story and inferred content. We apply the annotation method to a corpus of retellings, in which children retell the same story on three successive days. Our results indicate differences over time: on Day three, children have a more evenly distributed recall of events through- out the story, and include significantly more inferences. The results suggest a cognitive bootstrapping effect. We discuss the potential for application to diagnostic assessment of children’s narrative skills and tutorial applications

SET-THEORETIC MODELS AND UNIFIED METHODS OF INFORMATION RESOURCES PROCESSING IN E-BUSINESS SYSTEMS

In the given article is functional logistic model of commercial content processing as the content life cycle stage in electronic commerce systems proposed. The model of commercial content processing describes the information resources forming in electronic content commerce systems and automation technology simplifies the commercial content mana-gement. In the given article the main problems of electronic content commerce and functional services of commercial content processing are analyzed. The proposed model gives an opportunity to create an instru-ment of information resources processing in electronic commerce systems and to implement the subsystem of commercial content formation, management and support