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Controversy Analysis and Detection
Seeking information on a controversial topic is often a complex task. Alerting users about controversial search results can encourage critical literacy, promote healthy civic discourse and counteract the filter bubble effect, and therefore would be a useful feature in a search engine or browser extension. Additionally, presenting information to the user about the different stances or sides of the debate can help her navigate the landscape of search results beyond a simple list of 10 links . This thesis has made strides in the emerging niche of controversy detection and analysis. The body of work in this thesis revolves around two themes: computational models of controversy, and controversies occurring in neighborhoods of topics. Our broad contributions are: (1) Presenting a theoretical framework for modeling controversy as contention among populations; (2) Constructing the first automated approach to detecting controversy on the web, using a KNN classifier that maps from the web to similar Wikipedia articles; and (3) Proposing a novel controversy detection in Wikipedia by employing a stacked model using a combination of link structure and similarity. We conclude this work by discussing the challenging technical, societal and ethical implications of this emerging research area and proposing avenues for future work
Developing an ontology of mathematical logic
An ontology provides a mechanism to formally represent a body of knowledge. Ontologies are one of the key technologies supporting the Semantic Web and the desire to add meaning to the information available on the World Wide Web. They provide the mechanism to describe a set of concepts, their properties and their relations to give a shared representation of knowledge. The MALog project are developing an ontology to support the development of high-quality learning materials in the general area of mathematical logic. This ontology of mathematical logic will form the basis of the semantic architecture allowing us to relate different learning objects and recommend appropriate learning paths. This paper reviews the technologies used to construct the ontology, the use of the ontology to support learning object development and explores the potential future use of the ontology
Hybrid XML Retrieval: Combining Information Retrieval and a Native XML Database
This paper investigates the impact of three approaches to XML retrieval:
using Zettair, a full-text information retrieval system; using eXist, a native
XML database; and using a hybrid system that takes full article answers from
Zettair and uses eXist to extract elements from those articles. For the
content-only topics, we undertake a preliminary analysis of the INEX 2003
relevance assessments in order to identify the types of highly relevant
document components. Further analysis identifies two complementary sub-cases of
relevance assessments ("General" and "Specific") and two categories of topics
("Broad" and "Narrow"). We develop a novel retrieval module that for a
content-only topic utilises the information from the resulting answer list of a
native XML database and dynamically determines the preferable units of
retrieval, which we call "Coherent Retrieval Elements". The results of our
experiments show that -- when each of the three systems is evaluated against
different retrieval scenarios (such as different cases of relevance
assessments, different topic categories and different choices of evaluation
metrics) -- the XML retrieval systems exhibit varying behaviour and the best
performance can be reached for different values of the retrieval parameters. In
the case of INEX 2003 relevance assessments for the content-only topics, our
newly developed hybrid XML retrieval system is substantially more effective
than either Zettair or eXist, and yields a robust and a very effective XML
retrieval.Comment: Postprint version. The editor version can be accessed through the DO
Overview of the personalized and collaborative information retrieval (PIR) track at FIRE-2011
The Personalized and collaborative Information Retrieval (PIR) track at FIRE 2011 was organized with an aim to extend standard information retrieval (IR) ad-hoc test collection design to facilitate research on personalized and collaborative IR by collecting additional meta-information during the topic (query) development process. A controlled query generation process through task-based activities with activity logging was used for each topic developer to construct the final list of topics. The standard ad-hoc collection is thus accompanied by a new set of thematically related topics and the associated log information. We believe this can better simulate a real-world search scenario and encourage mining user information from the logs to improve IR effectiveness. A set of 25 TREC formatted topics and the associated metadata of activity logs were released for the participants to use. In this paper we illustrate the data construction phase in detail and also outline two simple ways of using the additional information from the logs to improve retrieval effectiveness
A Broad Evaluation of the Tor English Content Ecosystem
Tor is among most well-known dark net in the world. It has noble uses,
including as a platform for free speech and information dissemination under the
guise of true anonymity, but may be culturally better known as a conduit for
criminal activity and as a platform to market illicit goods and data. Past
studies on the content of Tor support this notion, but were carried out by
targeting popular domains likely to contain illicit content. A survey of past
studies may thus not yield a complete evaluation of the content and use of Tor.
This work addresses this gap by presenting a broad evaluation of the content of
the English Tor ecosystem. We perform a comprehensive crawl of the Tor dark web
and, through topic and network analysis, characterize the types of information
and services hosted across a broad swath of Tor domains and their hyperlink
relational structure. We recover nine domain types defined by the information
or service they host and, among other findings, unveil how some types of
domains intentionally silo themselves from the rest of Tor. We also present
measurements that (regrettably) suggest how marketplaces of illegal drugs and
services do emerge as the dominant type of Tor domain. Our study is the product
of crawling over 1 million pages from 20,000 Tor seed addresses, yielding a
collection of over 150,000 Tor pages. We make a dataset of the intend to make
the domain structure publicly available as a dataset at
https://github.com/wsu-wacs/TorEnglishContent.Comment: 11 page
Broad expertise retrieval in sparse data environments
Expertise retrieval has been largely unexplored on data other than the W3C collection. At the same time, many intranets of universities and other knowledge-intensive organisations offer examples of relatively small but clean multilingual expertise data, covering broad ranges of expertise areas. We first present two main expertise retrieval tasks, along with a set of baseline approaches based on generative language modeling, aimed at finding expertise relations between topics and people. For our experimental evaluation, we introduce (and release) a new test set based on a crawl of a university site. Using this test set, we conduct two series of experiments. The first is aimed at determining the effectiveness of baseline expertise retrieval methods applied to the new test set. The second is aimed at assessing refined models that exploit characteristic features of the new test set, such as the organizational structure of the university, and the hierarchical structure of the topics in the test set. Expertise retrieval models are shown to be robust with respect to environments smaller than the W3C collection, and current techniques appear to be generalizable to other settings
Escaping the Trap of too Precise Topic Queries
At the very center of digital mathematics libraries lie controlled
vocabularies which qualify the {\it topic} of the documents. These topics are
used when submitting a document to a digital mathematics library and to perform
searches in a library. The latter are refined by the use of these topics as
they allow a precise classification of the mathematics area this document
addresses. However, there is a major risk that users employ too precise topics
to specify their queries: they may be employing a topic that is only "close-by"
but missing to match the right resource. We call this the {\it topic trap}.
Indeed, since 2009, this issue has appeared frequently on the i2geo.net
platform. Other mathematics portals experience the same phenomenon. An approach
to solve this issue is to introduce tolerance in the way queries are understood
by the user. In particular, the approach of including fuzzy matches but this
introduces noise which may prevent the user of understanding the function of
the search engine.
In this paper, we propose a way to escape the topic trap by employing the
navigation between related topics and the count of search results for each
topic. This supports the user in that search for close-by topics is a click
away from a previous search. This approach was realized with the i2geo search
engine and is described in detail where the relation of being {\it related} is
computed by employing textual analysis of the definitions of the concepts
fetched from the Wikipedia encyclopedia.Comment: 12 pages, Conference on Intelligent Computer Mathematics 2013 Bath,
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