EntiTables: Smart Assistance for Entity-Focused Tables

Tables are among the most powerful and practical tools for organizing and working with data. Our motivation is to equip spreadsheet programs with smart assistance capabilities. We concentrate on one particular family of tables, namely, tables with an entity focus. We introduce and focus on two specific tasks: populating rows with additional instances (entities) and populating columns with new headings. We develop generative probabilistic models for both tasks. For estimating the components of these models, we consider a knowledge base as well as a large table corpus. Our experimental evaluation simulates the various stages of the user entering content into an actual table. A detailed analysis of the results shows that the models' components are complimentary and that our methods outperform existing approaches from the literature.Comment: Proceedings of the 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '17), 201

On-the-fly Table Generation

Many information needs revolve around entities, which would be better answered by summarizing results in a tabular format, rather than presenting them as a ranked list. Unlike previous work, which is limited to retrieving existing tables, we aim to answer queries by automatically compiling a table in response to a query. We introduce and address the task of on-the-fly table generation: given a query, generate a relational table that contains relevant entities (as rows) along with their key properties (as columns). This problem is decomposed into three specific subtasks: (i) core column entity ranking, (ii) schema determination, and (iii) value lookup. We employ a feature-based approach for entity ranking and schema determination, combining deep semantic features with task-specific signals. We further show that these two subtasks are not independent of each other and can assist each other in an iterative manner. For value lookup, we combine information from existing tables and a knowledge base. Using two sets of entity-oriented queries, we evaluate our approach both on the component level and on the end-to-end table generation task.Comment: The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieva

KioskAR: An Augmented Reality Game as a New Business Model to Present Artworks

This paper presents the architecture of KioskAR, which is a pervasive game implemented using augmented reality (AR). This game introduces a new business model that makes it possible for players to present their artworks in virtual kiosks using augmented reality, while they are having fun playing the game. In addition to competition between the players in the game, this game requires social interaction between players to earn more points. A user study is conducted to evaluate the sense of presence and the usability of the application. The results of experiments show that KioskAR can achieve a high level of usability as well as sense of presence

Nowcasting Mobile Games Ranking Using Web Search Query Data

In recent years, the Internet has become embedded into the purchasing decision of consumers. The purpose of this paper is to study whether the Internet behavior of users correlates with their actual behavior in computer games market. Rather than proposing the most accurate model for computer game sales, we aim to investigate to what extent web search query data can be exploited to nowcast (contraction of “now” and “forecasting” referring to techniques used to make short-term forecasts) (predict the present status of) the ranking of mobile games in the world. Google search query data is used for this purpose, since this data can provide a real-time view on the topics of interest. Various statistical techniques are used to show the effectiveness of using web search query data to nowcast mobile games ranking

A Comparison of Active and Passive Virtual Reality Exposure Scenarios to Elicit Social Anxiety

Social phobia is an anxiety disorder that results in an excessive and unreasonable fear of social situations. As a safe and controlled tool, Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) has been used to treat anxiety disorders and phobias. This paper aims to study whether VRET with active scenarios can challenge a person more than passive scenarios. By comparing participants who were exposed to active and passive scenarios in VRET, we show that active scenarios are more effective than passive scenarios to elicit social anxiety in healthy participants. We focus on eliciting social anxiety and creating the sense of presence as two parameters enhancing the efficacy of VRET scenarios

Knowledge base augmentation using tabular data

Large linked data repositories have been built by leveraging semi-structured data in Wikipedia (e.g., DBpedia) and through extracting information from natural language text (e.g., YAGO). However, the Web contains many other vast sources of linked data, such as structured HTML tables and spreadsheets. Often, the semantics in such tables is hidden, preventing one from extracting triples from them directly. This paper describes a probabilistic method that augments an existing knowledge base with facts from tabular data by leveraging a Web text corpus and natural language patterns associated with relations in the knowledge base. A preliminary evaluation shows high potential for this technique in augmenting linked data repositories

Play with one’s feelings: a study on emotion awareness for player experience

Summarization: Affective interaction between players of video games can elicit rich and varying patterns of emotions. In multiplayer activities that take place in a common space (such as sports and board games), players are generally aware of the emotions of their teammates or opponents as they can directly observe their behavioral patterns, facial expressions, head pose, body stance, and so on. Players of online video games, however, are not generally aware of the other players’ emotions given the limited channels of direct interaction among them (e.g., via emojis or chat boxes). It also turns out that the impact of real-time emotion-awareness on play is still unexplored in the space of online digital games. Motivated by this lack of empirical knowledge on the role of the affect of others to one’s gameplay performance, in this article, we investigate the degrees to which the expression of manifested emotions of an opponent can affect the emotions of the player and consequently his gameplay behavior. In this initial study, we test our hypothesis on a two-player adversarial car racing game. We perform a comprehensive user study to evaluate the emotions, behaviors, and attitudes of players in emotion aware versus emotion agnostic game versions. Our findings suggest that expressing the emotional state of the opponent through an emoji in real-time affects the emotional state and behavior of players that can consequently affect their playing experience.Παρουσιάστηκε στο: IEEE Transactions on Game