15560852
Performance analysis of pattern classifier combination by plurality voting
Plurality voting is widely used in pattern recognition. However, there is little theoretical analysis of plurality voting. In this paper, we attempt to explore the rationale behind plurality voting. The recognition/error/rejection rates of plurality voting are compared with those of majority voting under different conditions. It is demonstrated that plurality voting is more efficient in achieving the tradeoff between rejection rate and error rate. We also discuss some practical problems when applying plurality voting to real-world applications.
8724659
Estimating device availability in pervasive peer-to-peer environment
In pervasive computing environments, devices often communicate in a peer-to-peer manner, either for passing messages or collaboratively running applications. For any particular device, information about the availability of other devices can lead to more efficient communication and better execution of distributed tasks. For example, a device can distribute computation tasks to reliable devices and temporarily avoid unreliable ones. Since there usually is not a central server to coordinate or monitor the communication in such environment, a key technical challenge is for each individual device to predict the availability of other devices. In this paper, we describe some methods for predicting the availability of other devices using historic availability data of those devices obtained in routine usage. In this scheme, each device separately maintains data about the past communication with the other devices, and predicts current and future availability using the statistics of those data. These methods do not require any centralized monitoring or extra probing, and thus have very low computation cost. These characteristics make them suitable for small devices in a peer-to-peer environment.
8341476
Active document layout synthesis
Document layout analysis has been researched for many years. However, there is little work on the reverse of document layout analysis: document layout synthesis, whose goal is to generate logically correct and aesthetically appealing layout given the text/image contents and the flexible layout template. This paper introduces a new automatic document layout synthesis method, which can actively pursue the optimal text block height-width tradeoff simultaneously with the block position adjustment. The key idea is to use a cluster of linear functions to approximate the nonlinear height-width curve. Then two-pass simplex algorithm is used to solve the layout synthesis problem. This method has a wide range of applications, such as variable data printing (VDP), automatic table formatting, and automating document layout ground truth generation.
16311352
DIAL 2004 working group report on acquisition quality control
This report summarizes the discussions of the Working Group on Acquisition Quality at the International Workshop on Document Image Analysis for Libraries, Palo Alto, CA, 23-24 January 2004. Acquisition of the image is one of the most time intensive components of forming a digital library, and the quality of the acquisition will affect all later stages of the digital library project. The current state of the art in acquisition is analyzed. Problems and suggested improvements for image acquisition and storage formats and the special problems associated with acquisition from microfilm follows. A list of general suggestions was developed which was complemented by a wish list of things the Working Group would like to see followed in acquisition discussions in the future
18279251
Detection and analysis of table of contents based on content association
AbstractAs a special type of table understanding, the detection and analysis of tables of contents (TOCs) play an important role in the digitization of multi-page documents. Most previous TOC analysis methods only concentrate on the TOC itself without taking into account the other pages in the same document. Besides, they often require manual coding or at least machine learning of document-specific models. This paper introduces a new method to detect and analyze TOCs based on content association. It fully leverages the text information throughout the whole multi-page document and can be directly applied to a wide range of documents without the need to build or learn the models for individual documents. In addition, the associations of general text and page numbers are combined to make the TOC analysis more accurate. Natural language processing and layout analysis are integrated to improve the TOC functional tagging. The applications of the proposed method in a large-scale digital library project are also 
discussed.
15723189
Impact of imperfect OCR on part-of-speech tagging
Part-of-speech (POS) tagging is the foundation of natural language processing (NLP) systems, and thus has been an active area of research for many years. However, one question remains unanswered: How will a POS tagger behave when the input text is not error-free? This issue can be of great importance when the text comes from imperfect sources like optical character recognition (OCR). This paper analyzes the performance of both individual POS taggers and combination systems on imperfect text. Experimental results show that a POS tagger's accuracy decreases linearly with the character error rate and the slope indicates a tagger's sensitivity to input text errors.
4018890
Clustering Moving Objects for Spatio-temporal Selectivity Estimation
Many spatio-temporal applications involve managing and querying moving objects. In such an environment, predictive spatio-temporal queries become an important query class to be processed to capture the nature of moving objects. In this paper, we investigated the problem of selectivity estimation for predictive spatio-temporal queries. We propose a novel histogram technique based on a clustering paradigm. To avoid expensive computation costs, we developed linear time heuristics to construct such a histogram. Our performance study indicated that the new techniques improve the accuracy of the existing techniques by one order of magnitude.
33192410
Visual interactions with Web database content
In this paper, we describe an experimental web application, Visual MeSH that supports dynamic user interaction with medical vocabulary databases and literature databases. Visual MeSH is a client-server application based on Java RMI technology. It provides multiple views of MeSH term relationships and allows the user to explore term relationships visually. Visual MeSH helps the user improve both search precision and recall by making it easy to convert user’s natural language queries to controlled vocabulary-based queries.
4440052
An Optimal Divide-Conquer Algorithm for 2D Skyline Queries
Skyline query processing is fundamental to many applications including multi-criteria decision making. In this paper, we will present an optimal algorithm for computing skyline in the two dimensional space. The algorithm has the progressive nature and adopts the divide-conquer paradigm. It can be shown that our algorithm achieves the minimum I/O costs, and is more efficient and scalable than the existing techniques. The experiment results demonstrated that our algorithm greatly improves the performance of the existing techniques.
21113165
Graphical representations of electronic search patterns
Increasing numbers of researchers and developers are collecting data that trace the processes of humancomputer interactions. Although a variety of methods are used to collect such data, all researchers share common problems in representing and analyzing continuous streams of data. A set of methods and tools for graphically representing the search patterns of users interacting with a variety of databases and hypertexts is under development as part of ongoing research in electronic information seeking. The methodology described in this article involves defining state spaces of user options within a system, capturing keystrokes or mouse moves as raw data, coding these data into the state spaces, and analyzing user moves through the state space as evidence of goal-directed informationseeking strategies and patterns. A tool for displaying user moves through a state space has been developed and is described. The tool graphically represents data in a variety of formats, allowing human pattern recognition capabilities to be applied for data analysis. Graphs can be represented for individual searches or for multiple searches done by either a single searcher or by several searchers working on the same search task.
2460253
Approximate processing of massive continuous quantile queries over high-speed data streams
Quantile computation has many applications including data mining and financial data analysis. It has been shown that an /spl epsi/-approximate summary can be maintained so that, given a quantile query (/spl phi/,/spl epsi/), the data item at rank /spl lceil//spl phi/N/spl rceil/ may be approximately obtained within the rank error precision /spl epsi/N over all N data items in a data stream or in a sliding window. However, scalable online processing of massive continuous quantile queries with different /spl phi/ and /spl epsi/ poses a new challenge because the summary is continuously updated with new arrivals of data items. In this paper, first we aim to dramatically reduce the number of distinct query results by grouping a set of different queries into a cluster so that they can be processed virtually as a single query while the precision requirements from users can be retained. Second, we aim to minimize the total query processing costs. Efficient algorithms are developed to minimize the total number of times for reprocessing clusters and to produce the minimum number of clusters, respectively. The techniques are extended to maintain near-optimal clustering when queries are registered and removed in an arbitrary fashion against whole data streams or sliding windows. In addition to theoretical analysis, our performance study indicates that the proposed techniques are indeed scalable with respect to the number of input queries as well as the number of items and the item arrival rate in a data stream.