OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A probabilistic model based approach for blended search
Authors: Ning Liu, Jun Yan, Zheng Chen
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

In this paper, we propose to model the blended search problem by assuming conditional dependencies among queries, VSEs and search results. The probability distributions of this model are learned from search engine query log through unigram language model. Our experimental exploration shows that, (1) a large number of queries in generic Web search have vertical search intentions; and (2) our proposed algorithm can effectively blend vertical search results into generic Web search, which can improve the Mean Average Precision (MAP) by as much as 16% compared to traditional Web search without blending.
Identifying vertical search intention of query through social tagging propagation
Authors: Ning Liu, Jun Yan, Weiguo Fan, Qiang Yang, Zheng Chen
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

A pressing task during the unification process is to identify a user's vertical search intention based on the user's query. In this paper, we propose a novel method to propagate social annotation, which includes user-supplied tag data, to both queries and VSEs for semantically bridging them. Our proposed algorithm consists of three key steps: query annotation, vertical annotation and query intention identification. Our algorithm, referred to as TagQV, verifies that the social tagging can be propagated to represent Web objects such as queries and VSEs besides Web pages. Experiments on real Web search queries demonstrate the effectiveness of TagQV in query intention identification.
Analysis of community structure in Wikipedia
Authors: Dmitry Lizorkin, Olena Medelyan, Maria P. Grineva
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

We present the results of a community detection analysis of the Wikipedia graph. Distinct communities in Wikipedia contain semantically closely related articles. The central topic of a community can be identified using PageRank. Extracted communities can be organized hierarchically similar to manually created Wikipedia category structure.
Co-browsing dynamic web pages
Authors: Dietwig Lowet, Daniel Görgen
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Collaborative browsing, or co-browsing, is the co-navigation of the web with other people at-a-distance, supported by software that takes care of synchronizing the browsers. Current state-of-the-art solutions are able to do co-browsing of "static web pages", and do not support the synchronization of JavaScript interactions. However, currently many web pages use JavaScript and Ajax techniques to create highly dynamic and interactive web applications. In this paper, we describe two approaches for co-browsing that both support the synchronization of the JavaScript and Ajax interactions of dynamic web pages. One approach is based on synchronizing the output of the JavaScript engine by sending over the changes made on the DOM tree. The other approach is based on synchronizing the input of the JavaScript engine by synchronizing UI events and incoming data. Since the latter solution offers a better user experience and is more scalable, it is elaborated in more detail. An important aspect of both approaches is that they operate at the DOM level. Therefore, the client-side can be implemented in JavaScript and no browser extensions are required. To the best of the authors' knowledge this is the first DOM-level co-browsing solution that also enables co-browsing of the dynamic interaction parts of web pages. The presented co-browsing solution has been implemented in a research demonstrator which allows users to do co-browsing of web-applications on browser-based networked televisions.
sMash: semantic-based mashup navigation for data API network
Authors: Bin Lu, Zhaohui Wu, Yuan Ni, Guo Tong Xie, Chunying Zhou, Huajun Chen
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

With the proliferation of data APIs, it is not uncommon that users who have no clear ideas about data APIs will encounter difficulties to build Mashups to satisfy their requirements. In this paper, we present a semantic-based mashup navigation system, sMash that makes mashup building easy by constructing and visualizing a real-life data API network. We build a sample network by gathering more than 300 popular APIs and find that the relationships between them are so complex that our system will play an important role in navigating users and give them inspiration to build interesting mashups easily. The system is accessible at: http://www.dart.zju.edu.cn/mashup.
REST-based management of loosely coupled services
Authors: Heiko Ludwig, Jim Laredo, Kamal Bhattacharya, Liliana Pasquale, Bruno Wassermann
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Applications increasingly make use of the distributed platform that the World Wide Web provides - be it as a Software-as-a-Service such as salesforce.com, an application infrastructure such as facebook.com, or a computing infrastructure such as a "cloud". A common characteristic of applications of this kind is that they are deployed on infrastructure or make use of components that reside in different management domains. Current service management approaches and systems, however, often rely on a centrally managed configuration management database (CMDB), which is the basis for centrally orchestrated service management processes, in particular change management and incident management. The distribution of management responsibility of WWW based applications requires a decentralized approach to service management. This paper proposes an approach of decentralized service management based on distributed configuration management and service process co-ordination, making use RESTful access to configuration information and ATOM-based distribution of updates as a novel foundation for service management processes.
Automated construction of web accessibility models from transaction click-streams
Authors: Jalal Mahmud, Yevgen Borodin, I. V. Ramakrishnan, C. R. Ramakrishnan
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Screen readers, the dominant assistive technology used by visually impaired people to access the Web, function by speaking out the content of the screen serially. Using screen readers for conducting online transactions can cause considerable information overload, because transactions, such as shopping and paying bills, typically involve a number of steps spanning several web pages. One can combat this overload by using a transaction model for web accessibility that presents only fragments of web pages that are needed for doing transactions. We can realize such a model by coupling a process automaton, encoding states of a transaction, with concept classifiers that identify page fragments “relevant ” to a particular state of the transaction. In this paper we present a fully automated process that synergistically combines several techniques for transforming unlabeled
Visualization of Geo-annotated pictures in mobile phones
Authors: Roberto Manca, Francesco Massidda, Davide Carboni
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

In this work, a novel mobile browser for geo-referenced pictures is introduced and described. We use the term browser to denote a system aimed at browsing pictures selected from a large set like Internet photo sharing services. The criteria to filter a subset of pictures to browse are three: the user's actual position, the user's actual heading, and the user's preferences. In this work we only focus on the first two criteria leaving the integration of user's preferences for future developments.
Evaluating similarity measures for emergent semantics of social tagging
Authors: Benjamin Markines, Ciro Cattuto, Filippo Menczer, Dominik Benz, Andreas Hotho, Gerd Stumme
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Social bookmarking systems are becoming increasingly important data sources for bootstrapping and maintaining Semantic Web applications. Their emergent information structures have become known as folksonomies. A key question for harvesting semantics from these systems is how to extend and adapt traditional notions of similarity to folksonomies, and which measures are best suited for applications such as community detection, navigation support, semantic search, user profiling and ontology learning. Here we build an evaluation framework to compare various general folksonomy-based similarity measures, which are derived from several established information-theoretic, statistical, and practical measures. Our framework deals generally and symmetrically with users, tags, and resources. For evaluation purposes we focus on similarity between tags and between resources and consider different methods to aggregate annotations across users. After comparing the ability of several tag similarity measures to predict user-created tag relations, we provide an external grounding by user-validated semantic proxies based on WordNet and the Open Directory Project. We also investigate the issue of scalability. We find that mutual information with distributional micro-aggregation across users yields the highest accuracy, but is not scalable; per-user projection with collaborative aggregation provides the best scalable approach via incremental computations. The results are consistent across resource and tag similarity.
MASTH proxy: an extensible platform for web overload control
Authors: Vipul Mathur, Sanket Dhopeshwarkar, Varsha Apte
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Many overload control mechanisms for Web based applications aim to prevent overload by setting limits on factors such as admitted load, number of server threads, buffer size. For this they need online measurements of metrics such as response time, throughput, and resource utilization. This requires instrumentation of the server by modifying server code, which may not be feasible or desirable. An alternate approach is to use a proxy between the clients and servers.We have developed a proxy-based overload control platform called MASTH Proxy--Multi-class Admission-controlled Self-Tuning HTTP Proxy. It records detailed measurements, supports multiple request classes, manages queues of HTTP requests, provides tunable parameters and enables easy implementation of dynamic overload control. This gives designers of overload control schemes a platform where they can concentrate on developing the core control logic, without the need to modify upstream server code.
Community gravity: measuring bidirectional effects by trust and rating on online social networks
Authors: Yutaka Matsuo, Hikaru Yamamoto
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Several attempts have been made to analyze customer behavior on online E-commerce sites. Some studies particularly emphasize the social networks of customers. Users' reviews and ratings of a product exert effects on other consumers' purchasing behavior. Whether a user refers to other users' ratings depends on the trust accorded by a user to the reviewer. On the other hand, the trust that is felt by a user for another user correlates with the similarity of two users' ratings. This bidirectional interaction that involves trust and rating is an important aspect of understanding consumer behavior in online communities because it suggests clustering of similar users and the evolution of strong communities. This paper presents a theoretical model along with analyses of an actual online E-commerce site. We analyzed a large community site in Japan: @cosme. The noteworthy characteristics of @cosme are that users can bookmark their trusted users; in addition, they can post their own ratings of products, which facilitates our analyses of the ratings' bidirectional effects on trust and ratings. We describe an overview of the data in @cosme, analyses of effects from trust to rating and vice versa, and our proposition of a measure of community gravity, which measures how strongly a user might be attracted to a community. Our study is based on the @cosme dataset in addition to the Epinions dataset. It elucidates important insights and proposes a potentially important measure for mining online social networks.
Web service derivatives
Authors: Thomas Meinl, Benjamin Blau
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Web service development and usage has shifted from simple information processing services to high-value business services that are crucial to productivity and success. In order to deal with an increasing risk of unavailability or failure of mission-critical Web services we argue the need for advanced reservation of services in the form of derivatives.The contribution of this paper is twofold: First we provide an abstract model of a market design that enables the trade of derivatives for mission-critical Web services. Our model satisfies requirements that result from service characteristics such as intangibility and the impossibility to inventor services in order to meet fluctuating demand. It comprehends principles from models of incomplete markets such as the absence of a tradeable underlying and consistent arbitrage-free derivative pricing.Furthermore we provide an architecture for a Web service market that implements our model and describes the strategy space and interaction of market participants in the trading process of service derivatives. We compare the underlying pricing processes to existing derivative models in energy exchanges, discuss eventual shortcomings, and apply Wavelets to analyze actual data and extract long- and short-term trends.
Answering approximate queries over autonomous web databases
Authors: Xiangfu Meng, Zong Min Ma, Li Yan
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

To deal with the problem of empty or too little answers returned from a Web database in response to a user query, this paper proposes a novel approach to provide relevant and ranked query results. Based on the user original query, we speculate how much the user cares about each specified attribute and assign a corresponding weight to it. This original query is then rewritten as an approximate query by relaxing the query criteria range. The relaxation order of all specified attributes and the relaxed degree on each specified attribute are varied with the attribute weights. For the approximate query results, we generate users' contextual preferences from database workload and use them to create a priori orders of tuples in an off-line preprocessing step. Only a few representative orders are saved, each corresponding to a set of contexts. Then, these orders and associated contexts are used at query time to expeditiously provide ranked answers. Results of a preliminary user study demonstrate that our query relaxation and results ranking methods can capture the user's preferences effectively. The efficiency and effectiveness of our approach is also demonstrated by experimental result.
A generalised cross-modal clustering method applied to multimedia news semantic indexing and retrieval
Authors: Alberto Messina, Maurizio Montagnuolo
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Current Web technology has enabled the distribution of informative content through dynamic media platforms.In addition, the availability of the same content in the form of digital multimedia data has dramatically increased.Content-based, cross-media retrieval applications are needed to efficiently access desired information from this variety of data sources. This paper presents a novel approach for cross-media information aggregation, and describes a prototype system implementing this approach. The prototype adopts online newspaper articles and TV newscasts as information sources, to deliver a service made up of items including both contributions. Extensive experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a real-world business context.
Rethinking email message and people search
Authors: Sebastian Michel, Ingmar Weber
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

We show how a number of novel email search features can be implemented without any kind of natural language processing (NLP) or advanced data mining. Our approach inspects the email headers of all messages a user has ever sent or received and it creates simple per-contact summaries, including simple information about the message exchange history, the domain of the sender or even the sender's gender. With these summaries advanced questions/tasks such as "Who do I still need to reply to?" or "Find 'fun' messages sent by friends." become possible. As a proof of concept, we implemented a Mozilla-Thunderbird extension, adding powerful people search to the popular email client.
Why are moved web pages difficult to find?: the WISH approach
Authors: Atsuyuki Morishima, Akiyoshi Nakamizo, Toshinari Iida, Shigeo Sugimoto, Hiroyuki Kitagawa
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

This paper addresses the problem of finding new locations of moved Web pages. We discuss why the content-based approach has a limitation in solving the problem and why it is important to exploit the knowledge on where to search for the pages.
Content hole search in community-type content
Authors: Akiyo Nadamoto, Eiji Aramaki, Takeshi Abekawa, Yohei Murakami
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

In community-type content such as blogs and SNSs, we call the user's unawareness of information as a "content hole" and the search for this information as a "content hole search." A content hole search differs from similarity searching and has a variety of types. In this paper, we propose different types of content holes and define each type. We also propose an analysis of dialogue related to community-type content and introduce content hole search by using Wikipedia as an example.
Combining anchor text categorization and graph analysis for paid link detection
Authors: Kirill Nikolaev, Ekaterina Zudina, Andrey Gorshkov
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

In order to artificially boost the rank of commercial pages in search engine results, search engine optimizers pay for links to these pages on other websites. Identifying paid links is important for a web search engine to produce highly relevant results. In this paper we introduce a novel method of identifying such links. We start with training a classifier of anchor text topics and analyzing web pages for diversity of their outgoing commercial links. Then we use this information and analyze link graph of the Russian Web to find pages that sell links and sites that buy links and to identify the paid links. Testing on manually marked samples showed high efficiency of the algorithm.
PAKE-based mutual HTTP authentication for preventing phishing attacks
Authors: Yutaka Oiwa, Hiromitsu Takagi, Hajime Watanabe, Hirofumi Suzuki
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

We developed a new Web authentication protocol with password-based mutual authentication which prevents various kinds of phishing attacks. This protocol provides a protection of user's passwords against any phishers even if a dictionary attack is employed, and prevents phishers from imitating a false sense of successful authentication to users. The protocol is designed considering interoperability with many recent Web applications which requires many features which current HTTP authentication does not provide. The protocol is proposed as an Internet Draft submitted to IETF, and implemented in both server side (as an Apache extension) and client side (as a Mozilla-based browser and an IE-based one).
Instance-based probabilistic reasoning in the semantic web
Authors: Pedro Oliveira, Paulo Gomes
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Most of the approaches for dealing with uncertainty in the Semantic Web rely on the principle that this uncertainty is already asserted. In this paper, we propose a new approach to learn and reason about uncertainty in the Semantic Web. Using instance data, we learn the uncertainty of an OWL ontology, and use that information to perform probabilistic reasoning on it. For this purpose, we use Markov logic, a new representation formalism that combines logic with probabilistic graphical models.
Nearest-neighbor caching for content-match applications
Authors: Sandeep Pandey, Andrei Z. Broder, Flavio Chierichetti, Vanja Josifovski, Ravi Kumar, Sergei Vassilvitskii
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Motivated by contextual advertising systems and other web applications involving efficiency–accuracy tradeoffs, we study similarity caching. Here, a cache hit is said to occur if the requested item is similar but not necessarily equal to some cached item. We study two objectives that dictate the efficiency–accuracy tradeoff and provide our caching policies for these objectives. By conducting extensive experiments on real data we show similarity caching can significantly improve the efficiency of contextual advertising systems, with minimal impact on accuracy. Inspired by the above, we propose a simple generative model that embodies two fundamental characteristics of page requests arriving to advertising systems, namely, long-range dependences and similarities. We provide theoretical bounds on the gains of similarity caching in this model and demonstrate these gains empirically by fitting the actual data to the model.
Buzz-based recommender system
Authors: Nish Parikh, Neel Sundaresan
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

In this paper, we describe a buzz-based recommender system based on a large source of queries in an eCommerce application. The system detects bursts in query trends. These bursts are linked to external entities like news and inventory information to find the queries currently in-demand which we refer to as buzz queries. The system follows the paradigm of limited quantity merchandising, in the sense that on a per-day basis the system shows recommendations around a single buzz query with the intent of increasing user curiosity, and improving activity and stickiness on the site. A semantic neighborhood of the chosen buzz query is selected and appropriate recommendations are made on products that relate to this neighborhood.
Why is the web loosely coupled?: a multi-faceted metric for service design
Authors: Cesare Pautasso, Erik Wilde
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Loose coupling is often quoted as a desirable property of systems architectures. One of the main goals of building systems using Web technologies is to achieve loose coupling. However, given the lack of a widely accepted definition of this term, it becomes hard to use coupling as a criterion to evaluate alternative Web technology choices, as all options may exhibit, and claim to provide, some kind of "loose" coupling effects. This paper presents a systematic study of the degree of coupling found in service-oriented systems based on a multi-faceted approach. Thanks to the metric introduced in this paper, coupling is no longer a one-dimensional concept with loose coupling found somewhere in between tight coupling and no coupling. The paper shows how the metric can be applied to real-world examples in order to support and improve the design process of service-oriented systems.
Analyzing seller practices in a Brazilian marketplace
Authors: Adriano C. M. Pereira, Diego Duarte, Wagner Meira Jr., Virgílio A. F. Almeida, Paulo B. Góes
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

E-commerce is growing at an exponential rate. In the last decade, there has been an explosion of online commercial activity enabled by World Wide Web (WWW). These days, many consumers are less attracted to online auctions, preferring to buy merchandise quickly using fixed-price negotiations. Sales at Amazon.com, the leader in online sales of fixed-price goods, rose 37% in the first quarter of 2008. At eBay, where auctions make up 58% of the site's sales, revenue rose 14%. In Brazil, probably by cultural influence, online auctions are not been popular. This work presents a characterization and analysis of fixed-price online negotiations. Using actual data from a Brazilian marketplace, we analyze seller practices, considering seller profiles and strategies. We show that different sellers adopt strategies according to their interests, abilities and experience. Moreover, we confirm that choosing a selling strategy is not simple, since it is important to consider the seller's characteristics to evaluate the applicability of a strategy. The work also provides a comparative analysis of some selling practices in Brazil with popular worldwide marketplaces.