Natural language search of structured documents

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-47).This thesis focuses on techniques with which natural language can be used to search for specific elements in a structured document, such as an XML file. The goal is to create a system capable of being trained to identify features, of written English sentence describing (in natural language) part of an XML document, that help identify the sections of said document which were discussed. In particular, this thesis will revolve around the problem of searching through XML documents, each of which describes the play-by-play events of a baseball game. These events are collected from Major League Baseball games between 2004 and 2008, containing information detailing the outcome of every pitch thrown. My techniques are trained and tested on written (newspaper) summaries of these games, which often refer to specific game events and statistics. The choice of these training data makes the task much more complex in two ways. First, these summaries come from multiple authors. Each of these authors has a distinct writing style, which uses language in a unique and often complex way. Secondly, large portions of these summaries discuss facts outside of the context of the play-by-play events of the XML documents. Training the system with these portions of the summary can create a problem due to sparse data, which has the potential to reduce the effectiveness of the system. The end result is the creation of a system capable of building classifiers for natural language search of these XML documents.(cont.) This system is able to overcome the two aforementioned problems, as well as several more subtle challenges. In addition, several limitations of alternative, strictly feature-based, classifiers are also illustrated, and applications of this research to related problems (outside of baseball and sports) are discussed.by Stephen W. Oney.M.Eng

Democratizing Computational Tools for Interaction Designers

Abstrac

Thermodynamic analysis of an OC-OTEC system in the direct- contact condenser configuration incorporating predeaeration and reinjection

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1993.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 378-382)Microfiche.xvii, 382 leaves, bound ill. 29 c

FireCrystal: Understanding Interactive Behaviors in Dynamic Web Pages

For developers debugging their own code, augmenting the code of others, or trying to learn the implementation details of interactive behaviors, understanding how web pages work is a fundamental problem. FireCrystal is a new Firefox extension that allows developers to indicate interactive behaviors of interest, and shows the specific code (Javascript, CSS, and HTML) that is responsible for those behaviors. FireCrystal provides an execution timeline that users can scrub back and forth, and the ability to select items of interest in the actual web page UI to see the associated code. FireCrystal may be especially useful for developers who are trying to learn the implementation details of interactive behaviors, so they can reuse these behaviors in their own web site. 1

Expressing Interactivity with States and Constraints

<p>A Graphical User Interface (GUI) is defined by its appearance and its behavior. A GUI’s behavior determines how it reacts to user and system events such as mouse, keyboard, or touchscreen presses, or changes to an underlying data model. Although many tools are effective in enabling designers to specify a GUI’s appearance, defining a custom behavior is difficult and error-prone. Many of the difficulties developers face in defining GUI behaviors are the result of their reactive nature. The order in which GUI code is executed depends upon the order in which it receives external inputs. Most widely used user interface programming frameworks use an event-callback model, where developers define GUI behavior by defining callbacks—sequences of low-level actions—to take in reaction to events. However, the event-callback model for user-interface development has several problems, many of which have been identified long before I started work on this dissertation. First, it is disorganized: the location and order of event-callback code often has little correspondence with the order in which it will be executed. Second, it divides GUI code in a way that requires writing interdependent code to keep the interface in a consistent state. This is because maintaining a consistent state requires referencing and modifying the same state variables across multiple different callbacks, which are often distributed throughout the code. In this dissertation, I will introduce a new framework for defining GUI behavior, called the stateconstraint framework. This framework combines constraints—which allow developers to define relationships among interface elements that are automatically maintained by the system—and state machines—which track the status of an interface. In the state-constraint framework, developers write GUI behavior by defining constraints that are enforced when the interface is in specific states. This framework allows developers to specify more nuanced constraints and allows the GUI’s appearance and behavior to vary by state. I created two tools using the state-constraint framework: a library for Web developers (ConstraintJS) and an interactive graphical language (InterState). ConstraintJS provides constraints that can be used both to control content and control display, and integrates these constraints with the three Web languages—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. ConstraintJS is designed to take advantage of the declarative syntaxes of HTML and CSS: It allows the majority of an interactive behavior to be expressed concisely in HTML and CSS, rather than requiring the programmer to write large amounts of JavaScript. InterState introduces a visual notation and live editor to clearly represent how states and constraints combine to define GUI behavior. An evaluation of InterState showed that its computational model, visual notation, and editor were effective in allowing developers to define GUI behavior compared to conventional event-callback code. InterState also introduces extensions to the state-constraint framework to allow developers to easily re-use behaviors and primitives for authoring multi-touch gestures.</p