8028526
Enhancing Web privacy protection through declarative policies
The platform for privacy preferences (P3P) is a W3C framework for Web privacy management. It provides a standard vocabulary that Websites can use to describe their privacy practices. The presence of Web site published P3P policies enable users to configure Web browsers to allow, block or warn users during access and data exchange with Websites. It's a good idea that unfortunately is rarely used. We identify three primary reasons: (i) the languages available to describe user privacy preferences are not sufficiently expressive, (ii) P3P policies published by Web sites are not trusted by users and (iii) P3P framework does not provide a coherent view of available privacy protection mechanisms to the user towards addressing these issues; we present enhancements to the P3P framework. We use a more expressive policy language based on deontic concepts to describe user privacy-related policies, constraints and preferences. We introduce a new trust model for Websites and describe its use in user privacy preferences. Finally, we present sample policies to demonstrate the relevance of our work and offer it as an effective starting point towards enhancing Web privacy management.
468262
Collaborative joins in a pervasive computing environment
Abstract.We present a collaborative query processing protocol based on the principles of Contract Nets. The protocol is designed for pervasive computing environments where, in addition to operating on limited computing and battery resources, mobile devices cannot always rely on being able to access the wired infrastructure. Devices, therefore, need to collaborate with each other in order to obtain data otherwise inaccessible due to the nature of the environment. Furthermore, by intelligently using answers cached by peers, devices can reduce their computation cost. We show the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating performance of devices querying for data while moving in a citylike environment.
8623137
Semantic analytics on social networks: experiences in addressing the problem of conflict of interest detection
In this paper, we describe a Semantic Web application that detects Conflict of Interest (COI) relationships among potential reviewers and authors of scientific papers. This application discovers various 'semantic associations' between the reviewers and authors in a populated ontology to determine a degree of Conflict of Interest. This ontology was created by integrating entities and relationships from two social networks, namely "knows," from a FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend) social network and "co-author," from the underlying co-authorship network of the DBLP bibliography. We describe our experiences developing this application in the context of a class of Semantic Web applications, which have important research and engineering challenges in common. In addition, we present an evaluation of our approach for real-life COI detection.
14330906
Creating Context-Aware Software Agents
Sharing ontologies, sensing context and reasoning are crucial to the realization of context-aware software agents. This document de- scribes our efforts in using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Prolog Forward Chaining (Pfc) system to provide support for ontology sharing and reasoning in the CoolAgent Recommendation System (CoolAgent RS), a context-aware multi-agent system. We also describes the implementation of the CoolAgent RS document and cuisine recommendation services that provide tailored services by exploiting user's context.
1962537
Finding and Ranking Knowledge on the Semantic Web
Swoogle helps software agents and knowledge engineers find Semantic Web knowledge encoded in RDF and OWL documents on the Web. Navigating such a Semantic Web on the Web is difficult due to the paucity of explicit hyperlinks beyond the namespaces in URIrefs and the few inter-document links like rdfs:seeAlso and owl:imports. In order to solve this issue, this paper proposes a novel Semantic Web navigation model providing additional navigation paths through Swoogle's search services such as the Ontology Dictionary. Using this model, we have developed algorithms for ranking the importance of Semantic Web objects at three levels of granularity: documents, terms and RDF graphs. Experiments show that Swoogle outperforms conventional web search engine and other ontology libraries in finding more ontologies, ranking their importance, and thus promoting the use and emergence of consensus ontologies.
31295380
Intelligent Agents for Mobile and Embedded Devices
The pervasive computing environments of the near future will involve the interactions, coordination and cooperation of numerous, casually accessible, and often invisible computing devices. These devices, whether carried on our person or embedded in our homes, businesses and classrooms, will connect via wireless and wired links to one another and to the global networking infrastructure. The result will be a networking milieu with a new level of openness. The localized and dynamic nature of their interactions raises many new issues that draw on and challenge the disciplines of agents, distributed systems, and security. This paper describes recent work by the UMBC Ebiquity research group which addresses some of these issues.
7140689
Long-Distance Scrambling and Tree Adjoining Grammars
Scrambling, both local and long-distance, has recently attracted considerable attention among linguists and computational linguists. In this paper, we will explore the adequacy of the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) formalism for dealing with long-distance scrambling I in German. We will show that TAGs cannot capture the full range of constructions derived by scrambling. I[owever, Multi-Component TAGs (MC-TAG), an extension of TAGs introduced earlier [Joshi 1987a, Weir 1988] and utilized for linguistic purposes (e.g. for extraposition [Kroch and Joshi 1986]), can indeed capture the full range of constructions derived by scrambling. We will also present an ID/LP variant of TAG to capture the same constructions, and then comment on the relationship between the two systems.
5320074
Using Lexicalized Tags for Machine Translation
Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) is an attractive formalism for linguistic description mainly because of its extended domain of locality and its factoring recursion out from the domain of local dependencies (Joshi, 1985, Kroch and Joshi, 1985, Abeille, 1988). LTAG's extended domain of locality enables one to localize syntactic dependencies (such as filler-gap), as well as semantic dependencies (such as predicate-arguments). The aim of this paper is to show that these properties combined with the lexicalized property of LTAG are especially attractive for machine translation.The transfer between two languages, such as French and English, can be done by putting directly into correspondence large elementary units without going through some interlingual representation and without major changes to the source and target grammars. The underlying formalism for the transfer is "synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammars" (Shieber and Schabes [1990]). Transfer rules are stated as correspondences between nodes of trees of large domain of locality which are associated with words. We can thus define lexical transfer rules that avoid the defects of a mere word-to-word approach but still benefit from the simplicity and elegance of a lexical approach.We rely on the French and English LTAG grammars (Abeille [1988], Abeille [1990 (b)], Abeille et al. [1990], Abeille and Schabes [1989, 1990]) that have been designed over the past two years jointly at University of Pennsylvania and University of Paris 7-Jussieu.
38151734
Role of Constrained Computational Systems in Natural Language Processing
Abstract The use of constrained formal/computational systems just adequate for modeling various aspects of language—syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse, among others, has proved to be an effective research strategy leading to deep understanding of these aspects, with implications to both machine processing and human processing. This approach enables one to distinguish between the universal and stipulative constraints. This is in contrast to an approach where we start with the most powerful formal/computational system and then model the phenomena by making all constraints stipulative in a sense. The use of constrained systems for modeling leads to some novel ways of describing locality of structures and brings out the relationship between the complexity of description of primitives and local computations over them. These ideas serve to unify theoretical, computational and statistical aspects of natural languages processing in AI. It is expected that this approach will be productive in other domains of AI.
2902172
On correspondence, line tokens and missing tokens
In this article, the authors expand on some of their previous work on correspondence and propose a system that can correspond in the presence of both point and line tokens, or a mix of them. It can also work if some tokens present in one frame are not present in the other. The proposed algorithm is an amalgamation of reductionist and holist paradigms. We establish that properties which remain invariant for whole image sequences and sequences consisting of corresponding parts from each image frame can be used to establish correspondence. Extensive computer simulation results on synthesised data as well as real image sequences are presented to validate our claims.
2954113
Tree Adjunct Grammars
In this paper, a tree generating system called a tree adjunct grammar is described and its formal properties are studied relating them to the tree generating systems of Brainerd (Information and Control14 (1969), 217-231) and Rounds (Mathematical Systems Theory 4 (1970), 257-287) and to the recognizable sets and local sets discussed by Thatcher (Journal of Computer and System Sciences1 (1967), 317-322; 4 (1970), 339-367) and Rounds. Linguistic relevance of these systems has been briefly discussed also.