Exploiting Social Media Sources for Search, Fusion and Evaluation

The web contains heterogeneous information that is generated with different characteristics and is presented via different media. Social media, as one of the largest content carriers, has generated information from millions of users worldwide, creating material rapidly in all types of forms such as comments, images, tags, videos and ratings, etc. In social applications, the formation of online communities contributes to conversations of substantially broader aspects, as well as unfiltered opinions about subjects that are rarely covered in public media. Information accrued on social platforms, therefore, presents a unique opportunity to augment web sources such as Wikipedia or news pages, which are usually characterized as being more formal. The goal of this dissertation is to investigate in depth how social data can be exploited and applied in the context of three fundamental information retrieval (IR) tasks: search, fusion, and evaluation. Improving search performance has consistently been a major focus in the IR community. Given the in-depth discussions and active interactions contained in social media, we present approaches to incorporating this type of data to improve search on general web corpora. In particular, we propose two graph-based frameworks, social anchor and information network, to associate related web and social content, where information sources of diverse characteristics can be used to complement each other in a unified manner. We investigate how the enriched representation can potentially reduce vocabulary mismatch and improve retrieval effectiveness. Presenting social media content to users is valuable particularly for queries intended for time-sensitive events or community opinions. Current major search engines commonly blend results from different search services (or verticals) into core web results. Motivated by this real-world need, we explore ways to merge results from different web and social services into a single ranked list. We present an optimization framework for fusion, where impact of documents, ranked lists, and verticals can be modeled simultaneously to maximize performance. Evaluating search system performance has largely relied on creating reusable test collections in IR. Traditional ways to creating evaluation sets can require substantial manual effort. To reduce such effort, we explore an approach to automating the process of collecting pairs of queries and relevance judgments, using high quality social media, Community Question Answering (CQA). Our approach is based on the idea that CQA services support platforms for users to raise questions and to share answers, therefore encoding the associations between real user information needs and real user assessments. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches, we conduct extensive retrieval and fusion experiments, as well as verify the reliability of the new, CQA-based evaluation test sets

A Research In Relating Entrepreneurship, Marketing Capability, Innovative Capability And Sustained Competitive Advantage

The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationships of entrepreneurship, marketing capability, innovative capability, and sustained competitive advantage; hopefully to propose some new points of views in managing enterprises. We investigate the top 1000 Taiwan manufacturers in 2009 issued by Commonwealth magazine of Taiwan in this research. In total, 116 effective samples are collected. We use SEM linear structure equation model, and LISREL 8.7 editions of software for data analyses, and verify our hypotheses. The empirical results show: 1.entrepreneurship directly influence marketing capability, innovative capability and sustained competitive advantage respectively; and indirectly influence sustained competitive advantage through marketing capability and innovative capability respectively; 2.although marketing capability does not influence sustained competitive advantage directly, but influence sustained competitive advantages indirectly through innovative capability; in the other way, innovative capability influence sustained competitive advantage directly. Therefore, we suggest that an enterprise needs to develop its organizational culture of entrepreneurship and the two kinds of capabilities, marketing and innovation, hopefully to enhance its sustained competitive advantage

Scaffolding in PBL: A Case-study in Facilitated Soft Skill-set Learning amongst Adult Learners in Taiwan's Vocational Higher Education

Taiwan’s university-level vocational education is faced with a growing need to strengthen students’ soft skills as a means to increase job market eligibility. Students in Taiwan are usually not equipped with group learning skills in junior and senior high school education. These learning skills, however, are an essential component of a successful PBL course, according to past research. This case study describes how a PBL course that adopted various scaffolding strategies helped vocational students improve soft skills associated with real-life issues in the workplace. The adult learners participating in the tailored PBL course were PBL novices, yet their feedback on PBL effectiveness was positive. The success of the PBL course was attributed to 1) the use of effective scaffolding strategies, and 2) learner readiness in the skills needed for group learning

Characterizing and Predicting Email Deferral Behavior

Email triage involves going through unhandled emails and deciding what to do with them. This familiar process can become increasingly challenging as the number of unhandled email grows. During a triage session, users commonly defer handling emails that they cannot immediately deal with to later. These deferred emails, are often related to tasks that are postponed until the user has more time or the right information to deal with them. In this paper, through qualitative interviews and a large-scale log analysis, we study when and what enterprise email users tend to defer. We found that users are more likely to defer emails when handling them involves replying, reading carefully, or clicking on links and attachments. We also learned that the decision to defer emails depends on many factors such as user's workload and the importance of the sender. Our qualitative results suggested that deferring is very common, and our quantitative log analysis confirms that 12% of triage sessions and 16% of daily active users had at least one deferred email on weekdays. We also discuss several deferral strategies such as marking emails as unread and flagging that are reported by our interviewees, and illustrate how such patterns can be also observed in user logs. Inspired by the characteristics of deferred emails and contextual factors involved in deciding if an email should be deferred, we train a classifier for predicting whether a recently triaged email is actually deferred. Our experimental results suggests that deferral can be classified with modest effectiveness. Overall, our work provides novel insights about how users handle their emails and how deferral can be modeled

THE BIOMECHANICAL ANALYSIS OF THE TAEKWONDO FRONT-LEG AXE-KICK

The purpose of the study was to analyze the biomechanics of taekwondo front-leg axekick. One force plates, two synchronized high-speed cameras were used to measure biomechanical parameters in each phase of the front-leg axe-kick. The results included: 1. The average reaction time and movement time were 0.423 sand 0.327 s, which respectively occupied about 56% and 44% of attack time. 2. The maximum velocity of hip, knee and ankle were 1.74 m/s, 5.25 m/s and 7.43 m/s respectively. When the kicking leg touched the target, the velocity of knee and ankle were 0.78m/s, 1.72m1s, and 4.64m1s respectively. 3. The peak vertical GRF and impulse were 0.96 SW and 77.57N-s. For decreasing the movement time, it's suggested that an athlete should increase the power and flexibility of lower extremities during the training section