13,858 research outputs found
Finding Academic Experts on a MultiSensor Approach using Shannon's Entropy
Expert finding is an information retrieval task concerned with the search for
the most knowledgeable people, in some topic, with basis on documents
describing peoples activities. The task involves taking a user query as input
and returning a list of people sorted by their level of expertise regarding the
user query. This paper introduces a novel approach for combining multiple
estimators of expertise based on a multisensor data fusion framework together
with the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence and Shannon's entropy. More
specifically, we defined three sensors which detect heterogeneous information
derived from the textual contents, from the graph structure of the citation
patterns for the community of experts, and from profile information about the
academic experts. Given the evidences collected, each sensor may define
different candidates as experts and consequently do not agree in a final
ranking decision. To deal with these conflicts, we applied the Dempster-Shafer
theory of evidence combined with Shannon's Entropy formula to fuse this
information and come up with a more accurate and reliable final ranking list.
Experiments made over two datasets of academic publications from the Computer
Science domain attest for the adequacy of the proposed approach over the
traditional state of the art approaches. We also made experiments against
representative supervised state of the art algorithms. Results revealed that
the proposed method achieved a similar performance when compared to these
supervised techniques, confirming the capabilities of the proposed framework
Social Search: retrieving information in Online Social Platforms -- A Survey
Social Search research deals with studying methodologies exploiting social
information to better satisfy user information needs in Online Social Media
while simplifying the search effort and consequently reducing the time spent
and the computational resources utilized. Starting from previous studies, in
this work, we analyze the current state of the art of the Social Search area,
proposing a new taxonomy and highlighting current limitations and open research
directions. We divide the Social Search area into three subcategories, where
the social aspect plays a pivotal role: Social Question&Answering, Social
Content Search, and Social Collaborative Search. For each subcategory, we
present the key concepts and selected representative approaches in the
literature in greater detail. We found that, up to now, a large body of studies
model users' preferences and their relations by simply combining social
features made available by social platforms. It paves the way for significant
research to exploit more structured information about users' social profiles
and behaviors (as they can be inferred from data available on social platforms)
to optimize their information needs further
People on Drugs: Credibility of User Statements in Health Communities
Online health communities are a valuable source of information for patients
and physicians. However, such user-generated resources are often plagued by
inaccuracies and misinformation. In this work we propose a method for
automatically establishing the credibility of user-generated medical statements
and the trustworthiness of their authors by exploiting linguistic cues and
distant supervision from expert sources. To this end we introduce a
probabilistic graphical model that jointly learns user trustworthiness,
statement credibility, and language objectivity. We apply this methodology to
the task of extracting rare or unknown side-effects of medical drugs --- this
being one of the problems where large scale non-expert data has the potential
to complement expert medical knowledge. We show that our method can reliably
extract side-effects and filter out false statements, while identifying
trustworthy users that are likely to contribute valuable medical information
India's product patent protection regime: Less or more of "pills for the poor"?
The year 2005 marks the end of transition period for many developing countries with competent pharmaceutical sectors that competed in supplying generic versions of patented drugs to LDCs before, thereby inducing price competition and enhancing access to medicines. In a post-2005 scenario, the critical issue is whether LDCs without adequate manufacturing capabilities can make use of compulsory licensing expeditiously to induce price competition and secure lower prices. This paper uses empirical evidence collected during a firm-level survey of the Indian pharmaceutical sector to generate evidence on emerging strategies of firms. It shows that the vigour of compulsory licensing as a price-leveraging instrument post-2005 is incumbent mainly on its economic feasibility. It shows that Indian firms view the market potential (in terms of market size and profits involved in such supply, especially if they have to make specific technological investments to produce the drug) of the mechanism much more severely than before, and may be less inclined to engage in such production if their commercial expectations are grossly unmet. The analysis assesses implications of emerging strategies of firms in the Indian pharmaceutical sector for access to medicines both domestically and internationally, and highlights the challenges involved.product patents, Indian pharmaceuticals, generics, access
Targeted interest-driven advertising in cities using Twitter
Targeted advertising is a key characteristic of online as well as traditional-media marketing. However it is very limited in outdoor advertising, that is, performing campaigns by means of billboards in public places. The reason is the lack of information about the interests of the particular passersby, except at very imprecise and aggregate demographic or traffic estimates. In this work we propose a methodology for performing targeted outdoor advertising by leveraging the use of social media. In particular, we use the Twitter social network to gather information about users’ degree of interest in given advertising categories and about the common routes that they follow, characterizing in this way each zone in a given city. Then we use our characterization for recommending physical locations for advertising. Given an advertisement category, we estimate the most promising areas to be selected for the placement of an ad that can maximize its targeted effectiveness. We show that our approach is able to select advertising locations better with respect to a baseline reflecting a current ad-placement policy. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work on offline advertising in urban areas making use of (publicly available) data from social networks
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