6731955
Ubiquitous media agents: a framework for managing personally accumulated multimedia files
Abstract.A novel idea and framework of ubiquitous media agents is presented for managing personal multimedia objects. Media agents are intelligent systems that can autonomously do the following tasks. They automatically collect and build personalized semantic indices of multimedia data on behalf of the user whenever and wherever he accesses/uses these multimedia data. The sources of these semantic descriptions are the textual context of the same documents that contain these multimedia data. The URLs of these multimedia data are indexed using these textual features. When the user wants to use these multimedia data again, the media agents can help the user find relevant multimedia data and provide proper suggestions based on the semantic indices. The media agents learn from the user's interaction records to refine the semantic indices and to model user intentions and preferences. Various algorithms can be used to implement the framework, and a few of them are described in this paper. As shown in the experiments, the media agents are effective in gathering relevant semantics for media objects and learning to provide precise suggestions when the user wants to reuse relevant media objects again.
15310025
A study of relevance propagation for web search
Different from traditional information retrieval, both content and structure are critical to the success of Web information retrieval. In recent years, many relevance propagation techniques have been proposed to propagate content information between web pages through web structure to improve the performance of web search. In this paper, we first propose a generic relevance propagation framework, and then provide a comparison study on the effectiveness and efficiency of various representative propagation models that can be derived from this generic framework. We come to many conclusions that are useful for selecting a propagation model in real-world search applications, including 1) sitemap-based propagation models outperform hyperlink-based models in sense of both effectiveness and efficiency, and 2) sitemap-based term propagation is easier to be integrated into real-world search engines because of its parallel offline implementation and acceptable complexity. Some other more detailed study results are also reported in the paper.
17711119
IRC: an iterative reinforcement categorization algorithm for interrelated Web objects
Most existing categorization algorithms deal with homogeneous Web data objects, and consider interrelated objects as additional features when taking the interrelationships with other types of objects into account. However, focusing on any single aspects of these interrelationships and objects does not fully reveal their true categories. In this paper, we propose a categorization algorithm, the iterative reinforcement categorization algorithm (IRC), to exploit the full interrelationships between the heterogeneous objects on the Web. IRC attempts to classify the interrelated Web objects by iterative reinforcement between individual classification results of different types via the interrelationships. Experiments on a clickthrough log dataset from MSN search engine show that, with the Fl measures, IRC achieves a 26.4% improvement over a pure content-based classification method, a 21% improvement over a query metadata-based method, and a 16.4% improvement over a virtual document-based method. Furthermore, our experiments show that IRC converges rapidly.
5754331
Web-page summarization using clickthrough data
Most previous Web-page summarization methods treat a Web page as plain text. However, such methods fail to uncover the full knowledge associated with a Web page needed in building a high-quality summary, because many of these methods do not consider the hidden relationships in the Web. Uncovering the hidden knowledge is important in building good Web-page summarizers. In this paper, we extract the extra knowledge from the clickthrough data of a Web search engine to improve Web-page summarization. Wefirst analyze the feasibility in utilizing the clickthrough data to enhance Web-page summarization and then propose two adapted summarization methods that take advantage of the relationships discovered from the clickthrough data. For those pages that are not covered by the clickthrough data, we design a thematic lexicon approach to generate implicit knowledge for them. Our methods are evaluated on a dataset consisting of manually annotated pages as well as a large dataset that is crawled from the Open Directory Project website. The experimental results indicate that significant improvements can be achieved through our proposed summarizer as compared to the summarizers that do not use the clickthrough data.
2801577
Scalable collaborative filtering using cluster-based smoothing
Memory-based approaches for collaborative filtering identify the similarity between two users by comparing their ratings on a set of items. In the past, the memory-based approach has been shown to suffer from two fundamental problems: data sparsity and difficulty in scalability. Alternatively, the model-based approach has been proposed to alleviate these problems, but this approach tends to limit the range of users. In this paper, we present a novel approach that combines the advantages of these two approaches by introducing a smoothing-based method. In our approach, clusters generated from the training data provide the basis for data smoothing and neighborhood selection. As a result, we provide higher accuracy as well as increased efficiency in recommendations. Empirical studies on two datasets (EachMovie and MovieLens) show that our new proposed approach consistently outperforms other state-of-art collaborative filtering algorithms.
459986
A New Statistical Approach To Chinese Pinyin Input
Chinese input is one of the key challenges for Chinese PC users. This paper proposes a statistical approach to Pinyin-based Chinese input. This approach uses a trigram-based language model and a statistically based segmentation. Also, to deal with real input, it also includes a typing model which enables spelling correction in sentence-based Pinyin input, and a spelling model for English which enables modeless Pinyin input.
7363283
Self-adapting software for numerical linear algebra and LAPACK for clusters
This article describes the context, design, and recent development of the LAPACK for clusters (LFC) project. It has been developed in the framework of Self-Adapting Numerical Software (SANS) since we believe such an approach can deliver the convenience and ease of use of existing sequential environments bundled with the power and versatility of highly tuned parallel codes that execute on clusters. Accomplishing this task is far from trivial as we argue in the paper by presenting pertinent case studies and possible usage scenarios.
13035041
Searching the Web with Queries
In this paper we study the problem of searching the Web with online learning algorithms. We consider that Web documents can be represented by vectors of n boolean attributes. A search engine is viewed as a learner, and a user is viewed as a teacher. We investigate the number of queries a search engine needs from the user to search for a collection of Web documents. We design several efficient learning algorithms to search for any collection of documents represented by a disjunction (or a conjunction) of relevant attributes with the help of membership queries or equivalence queries.
1877127
Fault tolerant high performance computing by a coding approach
As the number of processors in today's high performance computers continues to grow, the mean-time-to-failure of these computers are becoming significantly shorter than the execution time of many current high performance computing applications. Although today's architectures are usually robust enough to survive node failures without suffering complete system failure, most today's high performance computing applications can not survive node failures and, therefore, whenever a node fails, have to abort themselves and restart from the beginning or a stable-storage-based checkpoint.This paper explores the use of the floating-point arithmetic coding approach to build fault survivable high performance computing applications so that they can adapt to node failures without aborting themselves. Despite the use of erasure codes over Galois field has been theoretically attempted before in diskless checkpointing, few actual implementations exist. This probably derives from concerns related to both the efficiency and the complexity of implementing such codes in high performance computing applications. In this paper, we introduce the simple but efficient floating-point arithmetic coding approach into diskless checkpointing and address the associated round-off error issue. We also implement a floating-point arithmetic version of the Reed-Solomon coding scheme into a conjugate gradient equation solver and evaluate both the performance and the numerical impact of this scheme. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed floating-point arithmetic coding approach is able to survive a small number of simultaneous node failures with low performance overhead and little numerical impact.
17657159
A Chinese-character thinning algorithm based on global features and contour information
This paper proposes a method of using run-length coding to perform thinning. First, we construct graphs from characters. The attributes (vertical lines, horizontal lines or points) of each node in the graph are determined according to the node's relationship to the nodes above and below it (we will refer to these relationships as global features) and the black runs within the node. Intersections between two adjacent segments are determined on the basis of the graph constructed and contour information. The thinning algorithm thus employs global features and contour information to produce a more accurate skeleton.
5722664
A Visualization System using Data Mining Techniques for Identifying Information Sources
The Visual Analysis System (VAS) was developed to couple emerging successes in data mining with information visualization techniques in order to create a richly interactive environment for information retrieval from the World Wide Web. VAS's retrieval strategy operates by first using a conventional search engine to form a core set,of retrieved documents. This core set is expanded by crawling from links in these documents to form a much larger set. The link topology of the larger set is then examined using data mining techniques to identify pages likely to be both relevant to the query and reliable as sources of information. Information visualization techniques are used to display the filtered set in a form amenable to the use of perceptual processes to filter and guide further user directed search. (Contains 16 references.) (MES) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. N tr) 00 7171A Visualization System using Data Mining Techniques for Identifying Information Sources Richard H. Fowler, Tarkan Karadayi, Zhixiang Chen, Xiannong Meng, Wendy A. Lawrence Fowler Department of Computer Science University of Texas Pan American United States {fowler, tkaradayi, chen, meng, wfowler @panam.edu} PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY