An office document retrieval system with the capability of processing incomplete and vague queries

TEXPROS (TEXt PROcessing System) is an intelligent document processing system. The system is a combination of filing and retrieval systems, which supports storing, classifying, categorizing, retrieving and reproducing documents, as well as extracting, browsing, retrieving and synthesizing information from a variety of documents. This dissertation presents a retrieval system for TEXPROS, which is capable of processing incomplete or vague queries and providing semantically meaningful responses to the users. The design of the retrieval system is highly integrated with various mechanisms for achieving these goals. First, a system catalog including a thesaurus is used to store the knowledge about the database. Secondly, there is a query transformation mechanism which consists of context construction and algebraic query formulation modules. Given an incomplete query, the context construction module searches the system for the required terms and constructs a query that has a complete representation. The resulting query is then formulated into an algebraic query. Thirdly, in practice, the user may not have a precise notion of what he is looking for. A browsing mechanism is employed for such situations to assist the user in the retrieval process. With the browser, vague queries can be entered into the system until sufficient information is obtained to the extent that the user is able to construct a query for his request. Finally, when processing of queries responds with an empty answer to the user, a query generalization mechanism is used to give the user a cooperative explanation for the empty answer. The generalizations of any given failed queries (i.e., with an empty answer) are derived by applying both the folder and type substitutions and weakening the search criteria in the original query. An efficient way is investigated for determining whether the empty answer is genuine and whether the original query reflects erroneous presuppositions, and therefore answering any failed query with a meaningful and cooperative response. It incorporates with a methodical approach to reducing the search space of generalized subqueries by analyzing the results of executing the query generalization and by efficiently applying the possible substitutions in a query to generate a small subset of relevant subqueries which are to be evaluated

Tools for enterprises collaboration in virtual enterprises

Virtual Enterprise (VE) is an organizational collaboration concept which provides a competitive edge in the globalized business environment. The life cycle of a VE consists of four stages i.e. opportunity identification (Pre-Creation), partner selection (Creation), operation and dissolution. The success of VEs depends upon the efficient execution of their VE-lifecycles along with knowledge enhancement for the partner enterprises to facilitate the future formation of efficient VEs. This research aims to study the different issues which occur in the VE lifecycle and provides a platform for the formation of high performance enterprises and VEs. In the pre-creation stage, enterprises look for suitable partners to create their VE and to exploit a market opportunity. This phase requires explicit and implicit information extraction from enterprise data bases (ECOS-ontology) for the identification of suitable partners. A description logic (DL) based query system is developed to extract explicit and implicit information and to identify potential partners for the creation of the VE. In the creation phase, the identified partners are analysed using different risks paradigms and a cooperative game theoretic approach is used to develop a revenue sharing mechanism based on enterprises inputs and risk minimization for optimal partner selection. In the operation phases, interoperability remains a key issue for seamless transfer of knowledge information and data. DL-based ontology mapping is applied in this research to provide interoperability in the VE between enterprises with different domains of expertise. In the dissolution stage, knowledge acquired in the VE lifecycle needs to be disseminated among the enterprises to enhance their competitiveness. A DL-based ontology merging approach is provided to accommodate new knowledge with existing data bases with logical consistency. Finally, the proposed methodologies are validated using the case study. The results obtained in the case study illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of proposed methodologies in each stage of the VE life cycle

Engineering Algorithms for Route Planning in Multimodal Transportation Networks

Practical algorithms for route planning in transportation networks are a showpiece of successful Algorithm Engineering. This has produced many speedup techniques, varying in preprocessing time, space, query performance, simplicity, and ease of implementation. This thesis explores solutions to more realistic scenarios, taking into account, e.g., traffic, user preferences, public transit schedules, and the options offered by the many modalities of modern transportation networks

Enhancing Online Discussion Forums with Topic-Driven Content Search and Assisted Posting

Online forums represent nowadays one of the most popular and rich repository of user generated information over the Internet. Searching information of interest in an online forum may be substantially improved by a proper organization of the forum content. With this aim, in this paper we propose an approach that enhances an existing forum by introducing a navigation structure that enables searching and navigating the forum content by topics of discussion. Topics and hierarchical relations between them are semi-automatically extracted from the forum content by applying Information Retrieval techniques, specifically Topic Models and Formal Concept Analysis. Then, forum posts and discussion threads are associated to discussion topics on a similarity score basis. Moreover, to support automatic moderation in websites that host several forums, we propose a strategy to assist a user writing a new post in choosing the most appropriate forum into which it should be added. An implementation of the topic-driven content search and navigation and assisted posting forum enhancement approaches for the Moodle learning management system is also presented in the paper, opening to the application of these approaches to several real distance learning contexts. Finally, we also report on two case studies that we have conducted to validate the two approaches and evaluate their benefits.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Pedagogically-driven Ontology Network for Conceptualizing the e-Learning Assessment Domain

The use of ontologies as tools to guide the generation, organization and personalization of e-learning content, including e-assessment, has drawn attention of the researchers because ontologies can represent the knowledge of a given domain and researchers use the ontology to reason about it. Although the use of these semantic technologies tends to enhance technology-based educational processes, the lack of validation to improve the quality of learning in their use makes the educator feel reluctant to use them. This paper presents progress in the development of an ontology network, called AONet, that conceptualizes the e-assessment domain with the aim of supporting the semi-automatic generation of assessment, taking into account not only technical aspects but also pedagogical ones.Fil: Romero, Lucila. Universidad Nacional del Litoral; ArgentinaFil: North, Matthew. The college of Idabo; Estados UnidosFil: Gutierrez, Milagros. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Facultad Regional Santa Fe. Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de Ingeniería en Sistemas de Información; ArgentinaFil: Caliusco, Maria Laura. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Facultad Regional Santa Fe. Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de Ingeniería en Sistemas de Información; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe; Argentin

Actes de la conférence BDA 2014 : Gestion de données - principes, technologies et applications

International audienceActes de la conférence BDA 2014 Conférence soutenue par l'Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble INP, le CNRS et le laboratoire LIG. Site de la conférence : http://bda2014.imag.fr Actes en ligne : https://hal.inria.fr/BDA201

Supporting feature-level software maintenance

Software maintenance is the process of modifying a software system to fix defects, improve performance, add new functionality, or adapt the system to a new environment. A maintenance task is often initiated by a bug report or a request for new functionality. Bug reports typically describe problems with incorrect behaviors or functionalities. These behaviors or functionalities are known as features. Even in very well-designed systems, the source code that implements features is often not completely modularized. The delocalized nature of features makes maintaining them challenging. Since maintenance tasks are expressed in terms of features, the goal of this dissertation is to support software maintenance at the feature-level. We focus on two tasks in particular: feature location and impact analysis via feature coupling.;Feature location is the process of identifying the source code that implements a feature, and it is an essential first step to any maintenance task. There are many existing techniques for feature location that incorporate various types of analyses such as static, dynamic, and textual. In this dissertation, we recognize the advantages of leveraging several types of analyses and introduce a new approach to feature location based on combining dynamic analysis, textual analysis, and web mining algorithms applied to software. The use of web mining for feature location is a novel contribution, and we show that our new techniques based on web mining are significantly more effective than the current state of the art.;After using feature location to identify a feature\u27s source code, maintenance can be completed on that feature. Impact analysis should then be performed to revalidate the system and determine which other features may have been affected by the modifications. We define three feature coupling metrics that capture the relationship between features based on structural information, textual information, and their combination. Our novel feature coupling metrics can be used for impact analysis to quantify the strength of coupling between pairs of features. We performed three empirical studies on open-source software systems to assess the feature coupling metrics and established three major results. First, there is a moderate to strong statistically significant correlation between feature coupling and faults. Second, feature coupling can be used to correctly determine about half of the other features that would be affected by a change to a given feature. Finally, we found that the metrics align with developers\u27 opinions about pairs of features that are actually coupled