7190108
NaLIX: an interactive natural language interface for querying XML
Database query languages can be intimidating to the non-expert, leading to the immense recent popularity for keyword based search in spite of its significant limitations. The holy grail has been the development of a natural language query interface. We present NaLIX, a generic interactive natural language query interface to an XML database. Our system can accept an arbitrary English language sentence as query input, which can include aggregation, nesting, and value joins, among other things. This query is translated, potentially after reformulation, into an XQuery expression that can be evaluated against an XML database. The translation is done through mapping grammatical proximity of natural language parsed tokens to proximity of corresponding elements in the result XML. In this demonstration, we show that NaLIX, while far from being able to pass the Turing test, is perfectly usable in practice, and able to handle even quite complex queries in a variety of application domains. In addition, we also demonstrate how carefully designed features in NaLIX facilitate the interactive query process and improve the usability of the interface.
1293275
Getting work done on the web: supporting transactional queries
Many searches on the web have a transactional intent. We argue that pages satisfying transactional needs can be distinguished from the more common pages that have some information and links, but cannot be used to execute a transaction. Based on this hypothesis, we provide a recipe for constructing a transaction annotator. By constructing an annotator with one corpus and then demonstrating its classification performance on another,we establish its robustness. Finally, we show experimentally that a search procedure that exploits such pre-annotation greatly outperforms traditional search for retrieving transactional pages.
32047
Constructing a Generic Natural Language Interface for an XML Database
We describe the construction of a generic natural language query interface to an XML database. Our interface can accept an arbitrary English sentence as a query, which can be quite complex and include aggregation, nesting, and value joins, among other things. This query is translated, potentially after reformulation, into an XQuery expression. The translation is based on mapping grammatical proximity of natural language parsed tokens in the parse tree of the query sentence to proximity of corresponding elements in the XML data to be retrieved. Our experimental assessment, through a user study, demonstrates that this type of natural language interface is good enough to be usable now, with no restrictions on the application domain.
16207650
Term Disambiguation in Natural Language Query for XML
Converting a natural language query sentence into a formal database query is a major challenge. We have constructed NaLIX, a natural language interface for querying XML data. Through our experience with NaLIX, we find that failures in natural language query understanding can often be dealt with as ambiguities in term meanings. These failures are typically the result of either the user's poor knowledge of the database schema or the system's lack of linguistic coverage. With automatic term expansion techniques and appropriate interactive feedback, we are able to resolve these ambiguities. In this paper, we describe our approach and present results demonstrating its effectiveness.
149024
Removing photography artifacts using gradient projection and flash-exposure sampling
Flash images are known to suffer from several problems: saturation of nearby objects, poor illumination of distant objects, reflections of objects strongly lit by the flash and strong highlights due to the reflection of flash itself by glossy surfaces. We propose to use a flash and no-flash (ambient) image pair to produce better flash images. We present a novel gradient projection scheme based on a gradient coherence model that allows removal of reflections and highlights from flash images. We also present a brightness-ratio based algorithm that allows us to compensate for the falloff in the flash image brightness due to depth. In several practical scenarios, the quality of flash/no-flash images may be limited in terms of dynamic range. In such cases, we advocate using several images taken under different flash intensities and exposures. We analyze the flash intensity-exposure space and propose a method for adaptively sampling this space so as to minimize the number of captured images for any given scene. We present several experimental results that demonstrate the ability of our algorithms to produce improved flash images.
27961753
Effective Algorithms for Tag Snp Selection
Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), due to their abundance and low mutation rate, are very useful genetic markers for genetic association studies. However, the current genotyping technology cannot afford to genotype all common SNPs in all the genes. By making use of linkage disequilibrium, we can reduce the experiment cost by genotyping a subset of SNPs, called Tag SNPs, which have a strong association with the ungenotyped SNPs, while are as independent from each other as possible. The problem of selecting Tag SNPs is NP-complete; when there are large number of SNPs, in order to avoid extremely long computational time, most of the existing Tag SNP selection methods first partition the SNPs into blocks based on certain block definitions, then Tag SNPs are selected in each block by brute-force search. The size of the Tag SNP set obtained in this way may usually be reduced further due to the inter-dependency among blocks. This paper proposes two algorithms, TSSA and TSSD, to tackle the block-independent Tag SNP selection problem. TSSA is based on A* search algorithm, and TSSD is a heuristic algorithm. Experiments show that TSSA can find the optimal solutions for medium-sized problems in reasonable time, while TSSD can handle very large problems and report approximate solutions very close to the optimal ones.
5628621
A context-aware infrastructure for supporting applications with pen-based interaction
Pen-based user interfaces which leverage the affordances of the pen provide users with more flexibility and natural interaction. However, it is difficult to construct usable pen-based user interfaces because of the lack of support for their development. Toolkit-level support has been exploited to solve this problem, but this approach makes it hard to gain platform independence, easy maintenance and easy extension. In this paper a context-aware infrastructure is created, called WEAVER, to provide pen interaction services for both novel pen-based applications and legacy GUI-based applications. WEAVER aims to support the pen as another standard interactive device along with the keyboard and mouse and present a high-level access interface to pen input. It employs application context to tailor its service to different applications. By modeling the application context and registering the relevant action adapters, WEAVER can offer services, such as gesture recognition, continuous handwriting and other fundamental ink manipulations, to appropriate applications. One of the distinct features of WEAVER is that off-the-shelf GUI-based software packages can be easily enhanced with pen interaction without modifying the existing code. In this paper, the architecture and components of WEAVER are described. In addition, examples and feedbacks of its use are presented.
1475500
Efficient XML Data Management: An Analysis
With XML rapidly gaining popularity as the standard for data exchange on the World Wide Web, a variety of XML management systems (XMLMS) are becoming available. The choice of an XMLMS is made difficult by the significant difference in the expressive power of the queries and the performance shown by these XMLMS. Most XMLMS are legacy systems (mostly relational) extended to load, query, and publish data in XML format. A few are native XMLMS and capture all the characteristics of XML data representation. This paper looks at expressive power and efficiency of various XMLMS. The performance analysis relies on the testbed provided by XOO7, a benchmark derived from OO7 to capture both data and document characteristics of XML. We present efficiency results for two native XMLMS, an XML-enabled semistructured data management system and an XML-enabled RDBMS, which emphasize the need for a delicate balance between the data-centric and document-centric aspects of XML query processing.
44498059
Penbuilder: Platform for the Development of Pen-Based User Interface
Pen-based user interfaces is widely used in mobile computing environment, which provides natural, efficient interaction. It has substantial differences from any previous interface and it is difficult to be implemented. A well-designed platform will improve the development of pen-based user interface. In this paper, the architecture of Pen-Book-Page-Paper is presented, which is extended from the metaphor of Pen-Paper. Penbuilder is a development platform based on this architecture. Pen-based user interface can be constructed from three layers of Penbuilder: modal-primitive layer, task-primitive layer and task layer. Each layer provides different extent supports for flexibility and reusability. The components of the platform are discussed in detail and some properties of the platform are argued. Penbuilder is also compliant for the development of distributed user interface. In the section of discussion, we analyze the platform through task tree. The platform provides full supports for extensibility and new interactive devices can be easily added.