Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal - Volume 3, issue 3

Authors: Díaz, Alberto | Gervás, Pablo

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: The designer of an information dissemination system based on user preferences stated as user models is currently faced with three basic design decisions: whether to use categories, keywords – or both – to enable the user to specify his preferences, whether to use a static long-term model or a dynamic short-term model to register those preferences, and what method to use to provide summaries of the available documents without losing information that may be significant to …a particular user even if it would not be considered as such in general terms. Current systems tend to provide one specific choice – either taken at design time by the developer or offered as mutually exclusive alternatives to the user. However, most of the options have relative merits. An efficient way of combining the various solutions would allow users to select in each case the combination of alternatives better suited for their needs. In this paper we defend the use of a combined approach that integrates: an enriched user-model that the user can customise to capture his long-term interests either in terms of categories (newspaper sections) or keywords, a personalised summarization facility to maximise the density of relevance of sent selections, and a tailored relevance feedback mechanism that captures short-term interests as featured in a user's acceptance or rejection of the news items received. Controlled experiments were carried out with a group of users and satisfactory results were obtained, providing material for further development. The experimental results suggest that categories and keywords can be fruitfully combined to express user interests, and that personalised summaries perform better than generic summaries at least in terms of identifying documents that satisfy user preferences. Show more

Keywords: Summarization, relevance feedback, personalisation, user modeling, text classification

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An international journal, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 135-154, 2005

Authors: Stojanovic, Nenad

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: In this paper we presented a framework for query refinement which is driven by user's information needs. Based on the analyses of the real web IR case studies we model the query refinement process as the process of decreasing query ambiguity with respect to the user's need. In the refinement process a user is provided with the query's neighborhood and the guidelines for changing the ambiguities of the query. The approach assumes the existence of a …controlled vocabulary, which is used for describing the content of information resources. We model the queries (query-answering pairs), ambiguities and refinements formally. The partial ordering of the query-answering pairs in the searching space represents the mathematical lattice structure, so that formal concept analysis is used as the mathematical backbone of the query refinement process. We present a case study related to the searching in MEDLINE, which shows the benefits of using our approach. Show more

Keywords: Query by navigation, query refinement, ontology, information need

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An international journal, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 155-169, 2005

Authors: Yoshida, Tetsuya | Shinkai, Daiki | Nishida, Shogo

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Recent development of the network such as the Internet makes it easy to retrieve documents over the World Wide Web (WWW). Document retrieval with search engines is convenient, especially to retrieve documents for a domain with which a user is not so familiar, since the retrieved documents can be used to get a gross overview of the domain as a preliminary investigation. However, when inappropriate query terms are used, it often results in retrieving too many …documents and the retrieved documents have to be scanned by the user him/herself to find out truly valuable ones. This paper proposes a document retrieval support system to reduce such "dual" retrieval by suggesting terms based on the relationship of relevant terms to the specified query terms. Semantic relations of terms are dealt with using a thesaurus and relevant terms for the terms are organized into a tree structure based on the relations defined in the thesaurus. Since the value of retrieved documents is intrinsically user-dependent, even when the same query terms are used, appropriate terms to facilitate document retrieval can vary depending on users. To realize personalization in term suggestion, the relationship of terms for the user is learned from a user-supplied case so that personalized terms can be suggested. A prototype system has been implemented and it is evaluated through experiments. The results of experiments are encouraging and show that it is worth following this path, especially for supporting users who are not yet familiar with the target domain. Show more

Keywords: Document retrieval support, term suggestion, personalization, term relationship

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An international journal, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 171-182, 2005

Authors: Carchiolo, Vincenza | Longheu, Alessandro | Malgeri, Michele

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Today, surfing on the net is not limited to the search of scientific information, indeed a generic user is interested in different kinds of information about business, music, travel and so on. When accessing web documents, however, the lack of explicit structure does not facilitate in understanding data semantics, thus the comprehension of logical organization of web data relies on user's intuition of the underlying author's schema. In this paper, we present an approach to web structuring based …on the analysis of the structure and the semantics of both web pages and sites, in order to discover and provide users with hidden schemas. Aimed benefits from this work are to facilitate the navigation inside web documents/sites, to promote the use of more powerful, semantic-based search methods and to allow better pages/sites management and re-design. Show more

Keywords: Web models, semi-structured data

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An international journal, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 183-198, 2005

Article Type: Other

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An international journal, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 199-200, 2005

Article Type: Other

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An international journal, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 201-201, 2005