5763081
A probabilistic approach to metasearching with adaptive probing
An ever-increasing amount of valuable information is stored in Web databases, "hidden" behind search interfaces. To save the user's effort in manually exploring each database, metasearchers automatically select the most relevant databases to a user's query. In this paper, we focus on one of the technical challenges in metasearching, namely database selection. Past research uses a precollected summary of each database to estimate its "relevancy" to the query, and in many cases make incorrect database selection. In this paper, we propose two techniques: probabilistic relevancy modelling and adaptive probing. First, we model the relevancy of each database to a given query as a probabilistic distribution, derived by sampling that database. Using the probabilistic model, the user can explicitly specify a desired level of certainty for database selection. The adaptive probing technique decides which and how many databases to contact in order to satisfy the user's requirement. Our experiments on real hidden-Web databases indicate that our approach significantly improves the accuracy of database selection at the cost of a small number of database probing.
1713822
A fast regular expression indexing engine
In this paper; we describe the design, architecture, and lessons learned from the implementation of a fast regular-expression indexing engine FREE. FREE uses a prebuilt index to identify the text data units which may contain a matching string and only examines these further. In this way, FREE shows orders of magnitude performance improvement in certain cases over standard regular expression matching systems, such as lex, awk and grep.
516682
Efficient Crawling Through URL Ordering
In this paper we study in what order a crawler should visit the URLs it has seen, in order to obtain more "important" pages first. Obtaining important pages rapidly can be very useful when a crawler cannot visit the entire Web in a reasonable amount of time. We define several importance metrics, ordering schemes, and performance evaluation measures for this problem. We also experimentally evaluate the ordering schemes on the Stanford University Web. Our results show that a crawler with a good ordering scheme can obtain important pages significantly faster than one without.
171503
Parallel crawlers
In this paper we study how we can design an effective parallel crawler. As the size of the Web grows, it becomes imperative to parallelize a crawling process, in order to finish downloading pages in a reasonable amount of time. We first propose multiple architectures for a parallel crawler and identify fundamental issues related to parallel crawling. Based on this understanding, we then propose metrics to evaluate a parallel crawler, and compare the proposed architectures using 40 million pages collected from the Web. Our results clarify the relative merits of each architecture and provide a good guideline on when to adopt which architecture.
2425278
Shuffling a Stacked Deck: The Case for Partially Randomized Ranking of Search Engine Results
In-degree, PageRank, number of visits and other measures of Web page popularity significantly influence the ranking of search results by modern search engines. The assumption is that popularity is closely correlated with quality, a more elusive concept that is difficult to measure directly. Unfortunately, the correlation between popularity and quality is very weak for newly-created pages that have yet to receive many visits and/or in-links. Worse, since discovery of new content is largely done by querying search engines, and because users usually focus their attention on the top few results, newly-created but high-quality pages are effectively "shut out," and it can take a very long time before they become popular.We propose a simple and elegant solution to this problem: the introduction of a controlled amount of randomness into search result ranking methods. Doing so offers new pages a chance to prove their worth, although clearly using too much randomness will degrade result quality and annul any benefits achieved. Hence there is a tradeoff between exploration to estimate the quality of new pages and exploitation of pages already known to be of high quality. We study this tradeoff both analytically and via simulation, in the context of an economic objective function based on aggregate result quality amortized over time. We show that a modest amount of randomness leads to improved search results.
1739520
Exploiting Geographical Location Information of Web Pages
Many information resources on the web are relevant primarily to limited geographical communities. For instance, web sites containing information on restaurants, theaters, and apartment rentals are relevant primarily to web users in geographical proximity to these locations. In contrast, other information resources are relevant to a broader geographical community. For instance, an on-line newspaper may be relevant to users across the United States. Unfortunately, the geographical scope of web resources is largely ignored by web search engines. We make the case for identifying and exploiting the geographical location information of web sites so that web search engines can rank resources in a geographically sensitive fashion, in addition to using more traditional information-retrieval strategies. In this paper, we first consider how to compute the geographical location of web pages. Subsequently, we consider how to exploit such information in one specific "proof-of-concept" application we implemented in JAVA, and discuss other examples as well.
9811102
Four-bend top-down global routing
We propose a new global net distribution approach for high-performance m/spl times/m two-dimensional arrays of very large scale integration and multichip-modules. The objective is to route n nets with minimum density of global cells, using a "small" number of bends. There are a number of applications where it is necessary to limit the number of bends on each wire. For example, it is desirable to limit the number of bends on each microstrip (transmission) line, for mismatches of line impedance can cause reflections from the junction points such as bends and vias. Furthermore, for high-performance routing, intersections of wires cause the use of more vias, which in turn require the use of more routing resources (because of the larger via pitch). This is the first paper that addresses a graph-theoretic framework to solve the bend-constrained global routing problem in two-dimensional arrays. In this paper, at each level of an underlying quad-tree, we present a novel four-bend routing algorithm by decomposing the original problem at level i into two subproblems that can be solved exactly based on a two-stage approach of smaller-sized linear program followed by min-cost flow networks. The overall (i.e., entire level of the four-way partition hierarchy) constraint and variable size for the first stage is O(md/sub o/), while the overall run time for the second stage is O(n/sup 3/ log n/sup 2/). The time complexity of such a hierarchical approach is one order of magnitude less than one of constructing a global routing using the min-cost-flow-based flat design approach. Last, we present an extension that permits a limited degree of control over the number of bends. The proposed algorithm can also be used for estimating the wireability in the early design planning stage for high-level synthesis. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
43684392
Wavelet Analysis Based Blind Watermarking for 3-D Surface Meshes
As most previous wavelet analysis based 3-D mesh watermarking methods embed the watermark information into wavelet coefficients arranged in a certain order, they have not been used as blind schemes since the connectivity information must be exactly known in the watermark extraction process. In this paper, we propose a blind watermarking method based on wavelet analysis for 3-D mesh model. Two new techniques are introduced. One is to exploit the statistical features of scale coefficients on an approximation (low resolution) level for watermark embedding. Another is to extract the hidden watermark, not from the same resolution level as used in embedding process, but directly from the spatial domain. As the proposed watermark detection does not require the wavelet analysis, any pre-processing such as registration and re-sampling, is not needed. These techniques allow to detect the watermark without referring to the original meshes. In addition, the proposed are applicable directly to irregular meshes by using irregular wavelet analysis. Through simulations, we prove that our method is fairly robust against various attacks including topological ones.
45001657
A New Subsumption Method in the Connection Graph Proof Procedure
Compared to most of the other resolution-based proof procedures, the connection graph proof procedure (CGPP) is superior due to its effective search space reduction rules. A test for subsumption in CGPP is sufficiently efficient in comparison with the standard test. But the subsumption with no restriction may cause logical inconsistency. The restriction on subsumption to maintain the consistency has been an open problem since it was first noticed in 1981. We define a newθ-subsumption which maintains the logical consistency and provides the graph transformation method which makes C subsume D with the new definition if C subsumes D with the original definition ofθ-sumsumption. 
 
In the subsumption test in CGPP, it is essential to find a set of pairwise strongly compatible matching substitutions between literals in two clauses. This paper presents an algorithm which finds a set of pairwise strongly compatible matching substitutions efficiently, based on both the reduction of possible matching substitutions and bit operations. The worst-case time complexity of this algorithm is analyzed in terms of the estimated maximal number of string comparisons and it is shown that our complexity is lower than the other algorithms based on the s-link test. 
 
Based on the new definition of subsumption and the improved algorithm for the pairwise strongly compatible test, an unrestricted subsumption algorithm and a restricted subsumption algorithm are suggested.
122713
Joint transmitter and receiver optimization in additive cyclostationary noise
A joint optimization of transmitter and receiver is considered for strictly band-limited linear modulations in additive cyclostationary noise. Under the assumptions that the period of the cyclostationarity of the noise is the same as the inverse of the symbol transmission rate and that the noise has a positive-definite autocorrelation function, the optimum transmitter and receiver waveforms that jointly minimize the mean-squared error at the output of the linear receiver are derived with the data sequence modeled as a wide-sense stationary (WSS) colored random process and the channel modeled as a linear time-invariant system with a general frequency-selective impulse response. Numerical results show that this joint optimization technique leads to a significant performance improvement over the systems with receiver-only optimization and the systems with no transmitter and receiver optimizations.
36016648
Echo Watermarking in Sub-band Domain
Echo hiding is a method for embedding information, called watermark, into an audio signal. In general, echo hiding is processed in the time domain by convolving audio signal with echo kernel, without any consideration of the frequency characteristics. In this paper, we propose an echo hiding technique, which inserts echo into sub-band signal so as to take account into the frequency characteristics. The proposed echo hiding enables to embed high-energy echo, while minimizing the host audio quality distortion. In addition, the proposed allows increasing watermark capacity, since it is possible to embed simultaneously some watermark bits into different sub-band signals. The simulation results show that the proposed is more effective than the conventional echo hiding, in terms of watermark capacity and robustness against various attacks.