26320424
Aurelia: Building Locality-Preserving Overlay Network over Heterogeneous P2P Environments
Traditional DHT-based overlays destroy data locality and make it hard to support complex queries (e.g., range query, similarity query, etc) in P2P systems. Additionally, the node heterogeneity is widely ignored in most existing overlay designs. In this paper, we propose a locality-preserving overlay design, called Aurelia, which can adapt to the heterogeneous P2P environment and exploit node heterogeneity to realize efficient routing and robust indexing. Aurelia preserves the data locality by abandoning the use of hashing for data placement and each peer is responsible for a continuous range of value. In Aurelia, the routing table size and index range are proportional to the node capacity, and multicasting is adopted for scalable routing table maintenance.
16461681
Analytical Study on Improving DHT Lookup Performance under Churn
The phenomenon of churn degrades the lookup performance of DHT-based P2P systems greatly. To date, a number of approaches have been proposed to handle it from both the system side and the client side. However, there lacks theoretical analysis to direct how to make design choices under different churn levels and how to configure their parameters optimally. In this paper, we analytically study three important aspects on improving DHT lookup performance under churn, i.e., lookup strategy, lookup parallelism and lookup key replication. Our objective is to build a theoretical basis for DHT designers to make better design choices in the future. We first compare the performance of two representative lookup strategies - recursive routing and iterative routing, and explore the existence of better alternatives. Then we show the effectiveness of parallel lookup in systems with different churn levels and how to select the optimal degree of parallelism. Due to the importance of key replication on lookup performance, we also analyze the reliability of replicated keys under two different replication policies, and discuss how to make configuration in different environments. Besides analytical study, our results are also validated by simulation, and Kad is taken as a case to show the meaningfulness of our analysis
1529609
Roogle: Supporting Efficient High-Dimensional Range Queries in P2P Systems
Multi-dimensional range query is an important query type and especially useful when the user doesn't know exactly what he is looking for. However, due to improper indexing method and high routing latency, existing schemes cannot perform well under high-dimensional situations. In this paper, we propose Roogle, a decentralized non-flooding P2P search engine that can efficiently support high-dimensional range queries in P2P systems. Roogle makes improvements on both indexing and routing. The high-dimensional data is indexed based on the maximum or minimum value among all dimensions. This simple indexing method performs rather well under high-dimensional situations and tolerates data points with missing values or different dimensionality. To speed query routing, Roogle is built on top of our proposed structured overlay – Aurelia, which has better routing performance by exploiting node heterogeneity. Aurelia also guarantees the data locality and efficiently support range queries. Experimental results from simulation validate the scalability and efficiency of Roogle.
12664404
Size Does Matter in Computer Collaboration: Heterogeneous Platform Effects on Human-Human Interaction
Because today's workforce is highly mobile, small wireless devices are being used to support mobile work collaboration. However, do computer platform differences affect such collaborations? This question is investigated through a controlled experiment that examines collaborative problem solving on different combinations of small and large computers. Experiment participants in the study work together on solving 2- and 3-dimensional variations of the popular Tetris™ game. Gender is used as a moderating variable to ascertain if prior observed effects on groups of males would be found among females. The findings indicate that platform differences affect communication and social behavior among both groups. Unexpectedly, collaboration amongst partners using small handhelds was the most cooperative and friendly because of the difficulty of solving the problem with the small device.
912349
Stochastic Inversion Transduction Grammars and Bilingual Parsing of Parallel Corpora
We introduce (1) a novel stochastic inversion transduction grammar formalism for bilingual language modeling of sentence-pairs, and (2) the concept of bilingual parsing with a variety of parallel corpus analysis applications. Aside from the bilingual orientation, three major features distinguish the formalism from the finite-state transducers more traditionally found in computational linguistics: it skips directly to a context-free rather than finite-state base, it permits a minimal extra degree of ordering flexibility, and its probabilistic formulation admits an efficient maximum-likelihood bilingual parsing algorithm. A convenient normal form is shown to exist. Analysis of the formalism's expressiveness suggests that it is particularly well suited to modeling ordering shifts between languages, balancing needed flexibility against complexity constraints. We discuss a number of examples of how stochastic inversion transduction grammars bring bilingual constraints to bear upon problematic corpus analysis tasks such as segmentation, bracketing, phrasal alignment, and parsing.
14628205
A Probabilistic Approach to Marker Propagation
Potentially, the advantages of marker-passing over local connectionist techniques for associative inference are (1) the ability to differentiate variable bindings, and (2) reduction in the search space and/or number of processing elements. However, the latter advantage has mostly been realized at the expense of accuracy and predictability. In this paper we consider a class of associative inference to which marker passing is often applied, variously called abductive inference, schema selection, or pattern completion. Analysis of marker semantics in a standard semantic net representation leads to a proposal for more strictly regulated marker propagation. An implementation strategy employing an augmented relaxation network is outlined.
8337549
Exploring A Two-market Genetic Algorithm
The ordinary genetic algorithm may be thought of as conducting a single market in which solutions compete for success, as measured by the fitness funtion. We introduce a two-market genetic algorithm, consisting of two phases, each of which is an ordinary single-market genetic algorithm. The two-market genetic algorithm has a natural interpretation as a method of solving constrained optimization problems. Phase 1 is optimality improvement; it works on the problem without regard to constraints. Phase 2 is feasibility improvement; it works on the existing population of solutions and drives it towards feasibility. We tested this concept on 14 standard knapsack test problems for genetic algorithms, with excellent results. The paper concludes with discussions of why the two-market genetic algorithm is successful and of how this work can be extended.
1713067
Improving Chinese Tokenization With Linguistic Filters On Statistical Lexical Acquisition
The first step in Chinese NLP is to tokenize or segment character sequences into words, since the text contains no word delimiters. Recent heavy activity in this area has shown the biggest stumbling block to be words that are absent from the lexicon, since successful tokenizers to date have been based on dictionary lookup (e.g., Chang & Chen 1993; Chiang et al. 1992; Lin et al. 1993; Wu & Tseng 1993; Sproat et al. 1994).We present empirical evidence for four points concerning tokenization of Chinese text: (1) More rigorous "blind" evaluation methodology is needed to avoid inflated accuracy measurements; we introduce the nk-blind method. (2) The extent of the unknown-word problem is far more serious than generally thought, when tokenizing unrestricted texts in realistic domains. (3) Statistical lexical acquisition is a practical means to greatly improve tokenization accuracy with unknown words, reducing error rates as much as 32.0%. (4) When augmenting the lexicon, linguistic constraints can provide simple inexpensive filters yielding significantly better precision, reducing error rates as much as 49.4%.