Meeting of the MINDS: an information retrieval research agenda

Since its inception in the late 1950s, the field of Information Retrieval (IR) has developed tools that help people find, organize, and analyze information. The key early influences on the field are well-known. Among them are H. P. Luhn's pioneering work, the development of the vector space retrieval model by Salton and his students, Cleverdon's development of the Cranfield experimental methodology, Spärck Jones' development of idf, and a series of probabilistic retrieval models by Robertson and Croft. Until the development of the WorldWideWeb (Web), IR was of greatest interest to professional information analysts such as librarians, intelligence analysts, the legal community, and the pharmaceutical industry

The Size Conundrum: Why Online Knowledge Markets Can Fail at Scale

In this paper, we interpret the community question answering websites on the StackExchange platform as knowledge markets, and analyze how and why these markets can fail at scale. A knowledge market framing allows site operators to reason about market failures, and to design policies to prevent them. Our goal is to provide insights on large-scale knowledge market failures through an interpretable model. We explore a set of interpretable economic production models on a large empirical dataset to analyze the dynamics of content generation in knowledge markets. Amongst these, the Cobb-Douglas model best explains empirical data and provides an intuitive explanation for content generation through concepts of elasticity and diminishing returns. Content generation depends on user participation and also on how specific types of content (e.g. answers) depends on other types (e.g. questions). We show that these factors of content generation have constant elasticity---a percentage increase in any of the inputs leads to a constant percentage increase in the output. Furthermore, markets exhibit diminishing returns---the marginal output decreases as the input is incrementally increased. Knowledge markets also vary on their returns to scale---the increase in output resulting from a proportionate increase in all inputs. Importantly, many knowledge markets exhibit diseconomies of scale---measures of market health (e.g., the percentage of questions with an accepted answer) decrease as a function of number of participants. The implications of our work are two-fold: site operators ought to design incentives as a function of system size (number of participants); the market lens should shed insight into complex dependencies amongst different content types and participant actions in general social networks.Comment: The 27th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 201

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

Development of a platform to align education and practice: bridging academia and the profession in Portugal

Limited fitness for practice may result from a mismatch between education and practice. Aiming to meet the common interests of academics and practitioners, the Portuguese Pharmaceutical Society (PPS) developed the Education and Practice Platform (EPP). The EPP includes one representative from each pharmacy faculty, and all Councils of Speciality Boards of Practice. Brainstorming with involved parties enabled sharing of interests, concerns and identifying a common path. Aims, mission, vision and values were set. The EPP's mission is to: act as an enabler to foster the quality and adequacy of education through sharing best practices, ultimately leading to facilitate professional integration, and to foster quality development in teaching practices with recognition for autonomy in freedom to teach and to learn. Its vision is an alignment of education and practice with the PPS' statutes to ensure validation of the competences defined for each practice area, and compliance with international guidance. Key performance indicators (KPIs) were set. Activities developed include the creation of a national forum to discuss education and practice, development of workshops on teaching methods and pharmacy internships, enhanced representation in international events and response to global and national requests. Ongoing work focuses on the creation of a common training framework in hospital and community pharmacy practice adapted to Portugal. The EPP is a worldwide case study, encouraging the development of discussion contributing to an open climate of sharing best practices, indirectly leading to foster a better alignment between education and practice. Many of these results are so far intangible in scientific terms but worth describing.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Trolls Identification within an Uncertain Framework

The web plays an important role in people's social lives since the emergence of Web 2.0. It facilitates the interaction between users, gives them the possibility to freely interact, share and collaborate through social networks, online communities forums, blogs, wikis and other online collaborative media. However, an other side of the web is negatively taken such as posting inflammatory messages. Thus, when dealing with the online communities forums, the managers seek to always enhance the performance of such platforms. In fact, to keep the serenity and prohibit the disturbance of the normal atmosphere, managers always try to novice users against these malicious persons by posting such message (DO NOT FEED TROLLS). But, this kind of warning is not enough to reduce this phenomenon. In this context we propose a new approach for detecting malicious people also called 'Trolls' in order to allow community managers to take their ability to post online. To be more realistic, our proposal is defined within an uncertain framework. Based on the assumption consisting on the trolls' integration in the successful discussion threads, we try to detect the presence of such malicious users. Indeed, this method is based on a conflict measure of the belief function theory applied between the different messages of the thread. In order to show the feasibility and the result of our approach, we test it in different simulated data.Comment: International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence - ICTAI , Nov 2014, Limassol, Cypru