OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Validating the use and role of visual elements of web pages in navigation with an eye-tracking study
Authors: Yeliz Yesilada, Caroline Jay, Robert Stevens, Simon Harper
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

This paper presents an eye-tracking study that examines how people use the visual elements of Web pages to complete certain tasks. Whilst these elements are available to play their role in these tasks for sighted users, it is not the case for visually disabled users. This lack of access to some visual elements of a page means that visually disabled users are hindered in accomplishing these tasks. Our previous work has introduced a framework that identifies these elements and then reengineers Web pages such that these elements can play their intended roles in an audio, as well as visual presentation. To further improve our understanding of how these elements are used and to validate our framework, we track the eye movements of sighted users performing a number of different tasks. The resulting gaze data show that there is a strong relationship between the aspects of a page that receive visual attention and the objects identified by our framework. The study also shows some limitations, as well as yielding information to address these short-comings. Perhaps the most important result is the support provided for a particular kind of object called a Way Edge - the visual construct used to group content into sections. There is a significant effect of Way Edges on the distribution of attention across tasks. This is a result that not only provides strong evidence for the utility of re-engineering, but also has consequences for our understanding of how people allocate attention to different parts of a page. We speculate that the phenomenon of 'Banner Blindness' owes as much to Way Edges, as it does to colour and font size.
Deciphering mobile search patterns: a study of Yahoo! mobile search queries
Authors: Jeonghee Yi, Farzin Maghoul, Jan O. Pedersen
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

In this paper we study the characteristics of search queries submitted from mobile devices using various Yahoo! one-Search applications during a 2 months period in the second half of 2007, and report the query patterns derived from 20 million English sample queries submitted by users in US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. We examine the query distribution and topical categories the queries belong to in order to find new trends. We compare and contrast the search patterns between US vs international queries, and between queries from various search interfaces (XHTML/WAP, java widgets, and SMS). We also compare our results with previous studies wherever possible, either to confirm previous findings, or to find interesting differences in the query distribution and pattern.
The seamless browser: enhancing the speed of web browsing by zooming and preview thumbnails
Authors: ByungIn Yoo, JongHo Lea, YeunBae Kim
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

In this paper, we present a new web browsing system, Seamless Browser, for fast link traversal on a large screen like TV In navigating web, users mainly suffer from cognitive overhead of determining whether or not to follow links. This overhead can be reduced by providing preview information of the destination of links, and also by providing semantic cues on the nearest location in relation to the anchor. In order to reduce disorientation and annoyance from the preview information, we propose that users will focus on the small area nearside around a pointer, and a small number of hyperlink previews in that focused area will appear differently depending on the distances between the pointer and the hyperlinks: the nearer the distance is, the richer the content of the information scent is. We also propose that users can navigate the link paths by controlling the pointer and the zooming interface, so that users may go backward and forward seamlessly along several possible link paths. We found that combining the pointer and a zoom significantly improved performance for navigational tasks.
Better abstractions for secure server-side scripting
Authors: Dachuan Yu, Ajay Chander, Hiroshi Inamura, Igor Serikov
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

It is notoriously difficult to program a solid web application. Besides addressing web interactions, state maintenance, and whimsical user navigation behaviors, programmers must also avoid a minefield of security vulnerabilities. The problem is twofold. First, we lack a clear understanding of the new computation model underlying web applications. Second, we lack proper abstractions for hiding common and subtle coding details that are orthogonal to the business functionalities of specific web applications.
Reasoning about similarity queries in text retrieval tasks
Authors: Xiaohui Yu, Yang Liu
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

In many text retrieval tasks, it is highly desirable to obtain a "similarity profile" of the document collection for a given query. We propose sampling-based techniques to address this need, using calibration techniques to improve the accuracy. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
The scale-free nature of semantic web ontology
Authors: Hongyu Zhang
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

Semantic web ontology languages, such as OWL, have been widely used for knowledge representation. Through empirical analysis of real-world ontologies we discover that, like many natural and social phenomenon, the semantic web ontology is also "scale-free".
Performance of compressed inverted list caching in search engines
Authors: Jiangong Zhang, Xiaohui Long, Torsten Suel
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

Due to the rapid growth in the size of the web, web search engines are facing enormous performance challenges. The larger engines in particular have to be able to process tens of thousands of queries per second on tens of billions of documents, making query throughput a critical issue. To satisfy this heavy workload, search engines use a variety of performance optimizations including index compression, caching, and early termination.
Semantic similarity based on compact concept ontology
Authors: Ce Zhang, Yu-Jing Wang, Bin Cui, Gao Cong
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

This paper presents a new method of calculating the semantic similarity between two articles based on WordNet. To further improve the performance of the proposed method, we build a new Compact Concept Ontology (CCO) from WordNet by combining the words with similar semantic meanings. The experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms a recent proposal of computing semantic similarity, and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed CCO method.
Floatcascade learning for fast imbalanced web mining
Authors: Xiaoxun Zhang, Xueying Wang, Honglei Guo, Zhili Guo, Xian Wu, Zhong Su
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

This paper is concerned with the problem of Imbalanced Classification (IC) in web mining, which often arises on the web due to the "Matthew Effect". As web IC applications usually need to provide online service for user and deal with large volume of data, classification speed emerges as an important issue to be addressed. In face detection, Asymmetric Cascade is used to speed up imbalanced classification by building a cascade structure of simple classifiers, but it often causes a loss of classification accuracy due to the iterative feature addition in its learning procedure. In this paper, we adopt the idea of cascade classifier in imbalanced web mining for fast classification and propose a novel asymmetric cascade learning method called FloatCascade to improve the accuracy. To the end, FloatCascade selects fewer yet more effective features at each stage of the cascade classifier. In addition, a decision-tree scheme is adopted to enhance feature diversity and discrimination capability for FloatCascade learning. We evaluate FloatCascade through two typical IC applications in web mining: web page categorization and citation matching. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of FloatCascade comparing to the state-of-the-art IC methods like Asymmetric Cascade, Asymmetric AdaBoost and Weighted SVM.
Web user de-identification in personalization
Authors: Jiaqian Zheng, Jing Yao, Junyu Niu
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

It is a kind of privacy infraction in personalized web service if the user profile submitted to one web site transferred to another site without user permission. That can cause the second web site easily re-identify to whom these personal data belong, no matter whether the transfer is under control or by hacking.
A generic framework for collaborative multi-perspective ontology acquisition
Authors: Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet, Judit Bar-Ilan, Yitzchak Miller, Snunith Shoham
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

The research objective of this work is to develop a general framework that incorporates collaborative social tagging with a novel ontology scheme conveying multiple perspectives. We propose a framework where multiple users tag the same object (an image in our case), and an ontology is extended based on these tags while being tolerant about different points of view. We are not aware of any other work that attempted to devise such an environment and to study its dynamics. The proposed framework characterizes the underlying processes for controlled collaborative development of a multi-perspective ontology and its application to improve image annotation, searching and browsing. Our case study experiment with a set of selected annotated images indicates the soundness of the proposed ontological model.
Exploring social annotations for information retrieval
Authors: Ding Zhou, Jiang Bian, Shuyi Zheng, Hongyuan Zha, C. Lee Giles
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

Social annotation has gained increasing popularity in many Web-based applications, leading to an emerging research area in text analysis and information retrieval. This paper is concerned with developing probabilistic models and computational algorithms for social annotations. We propose a unified framework to combine the modeling of social annotations with the language modeling-based methods for information retrieval. The proposed approach consists of two steps: (1) discovering topics in the contents and annotations of documents while categorizing the users by domains; and (2) enhancing document and query language models by incorporating user domain interests as well as topical background models. In particular, we propose a new general generative model for social annotations, which is then simplified to a computationally tractable hierarchical Bayesian network. Then we apply smoothing techniques in a risk minimization framework to incorporate the topical information to language models. Experiments are carried out on a realworld annotation data set sampled from del.icio.us. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over traditional approaches.
Algorithm for stochastic multiple-choice knapsack problem and application to keywords bidding
Authors: Yunhong Zhou, Victor Naroditskiy
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

We model budget-constrained keyword bidding in sponsored search auctions as a stochastic multiple-choice knapsack problem (S-MCKP) and design an algorithm to solve S-MCKP and the corresponding bidding optimization problem. Our algorithm selects items online based on a threshold function which can be built/updated using historical data. Our algorithm achieved about 99% performance compared to the offline optimum when applied to a real bidding dataset. With synthetic dataset and iid item-sets, its performance ratio against the offline optimum converges to one empirically with increasing number of periods.
Context-sensitive QoS model: a rule-based approach to web service composition
Authors: Tao Zhou, Xiaolin Zheng, William Wei Song, Xiaofeng Du, Deren Chen
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

Generally, web services are provided with different QoS values, so they can be selected dynamically in service composition process. However, the conventional context free composition QoS model does not consider the changeability of QoS values and the context sensitive constraints during composition process. In this paper, we propose a rule based context sensitive QoS model to support the changeability of QoS values and the context sensitive constraints. By considering context in the QoS model, web service composition can be used widely and flexibly in the real world business.
User oriented link function classification
Authors: Mingliang Zhu, Weiming Hu, Ou Wu, Xi Li, Xiaoqin Zhang
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

Currently most link-related applications treat all links in the same web page to be identical. One link-related application usually requires one certain property of hyperlinks but actually not all links have this property or they have this property on different levels. Based on a study of how human users judge the links, the idea of the link function classification (LFC) is introduced in this paper. The link functions reflect the purpose that links are created by web page designers and the way they are used by viewers. Links in a certain function class imply one certain relationship between the adjacent pages, and thus they can be assumed to have similar properties. An algorithm is proposed to analyze the link functions based on both vision and structure features which simulates the reaction on the links of human users. Current applications can be enhanced by LFC with a more accurate modeling of the web graph. New mining methods can be also developed by making more and stronger assumptions on links within each function class due to the purer property set they share.
A teapot graph and its hierarchical structure of the chinese web
Authors: Jonathan J. H. Zhu, Tao Meng, Zhengmao Xie, Geng Li, Xiaoming Li
Venue: WWW
Year: 2008

The shape of the Web in terms of its graphical structure has been a widely interested topic. Two graphs, Bow Tie and Daisy, have stood out from previous research. In this work, we take a different approach, by viewing the Web as a hierarchy of three levels, namely page level, host level, and domain level. Such structures are analyzed and compared with a snapshot of Chinese Web in early 2006, involving 830 million pages, 17 million hosts, and 0.8 million domains. Some interesting results have emerged. For example, the Chinese Web appears more like a teapot (with a large size of SCC, a medium size of IN and a small size of OUT) at page level than the classic bow tie or daisy shape. Some challenging phenomena are also observed. For example, the INs become much smaller than OUTs at host and domain levels. Future work will tackle these puzzles.
General auction mechanism for search advertising
Authors: Gagan Aggarwal, S. Muthukrishnan, Dávid Pál, Martin Pál
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

In sponsored search, a number of advertising slots is available on a search results page, and have to be allocated among a set of advertisers competing to display an ad on the page. This gives rise to a bipartite matching market that is typically cleared by the way of an automated auction. Several auction mechanisms have been proposed, with variants of the Generalized Second Price (GSP) being widely used in practice. There is a rich body of work on bipartite matching markets that builds upon the stable marriage model of Gale and Shapley and the assignment model of Shapley and Shubik. This line of research offers deep insights into the structure of stable outcomes in such markets and their incentive properties. In this paper, we model advertising auctions in terms of an assignment model with linear utilities, extended with bidder and item specific maximum and minimum prices. Auction mechanisms like the commonly used GSP or the well-known Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) can be interpreted as simply computing a bidder-optimal stable matching in this model, for a suitably defined set of bidder preferences, but our model includes much richer bidders and preferences. We prove that in our model the existence of a stable matching is guaranteed, and under a non-degeneracy assumption a bidder-optimal stable matching exists as well. We give an algorithm to find such matching in polynomial time, and use it to design truthful mechanism that generalizes GSP, is truthful for profit-maximizing bidders, correctly implements features like bidder-specific minimum prices and position-specific bids, and works for rich mixtures of bidders and preferences. Our main technical contributions are the existence of bidder-optimal matchings and strategyproofness of the resulting mechanism, and are proved by induction on the progress of the matching algorithm.
Efficient application placement in a dynamic hosting platform
Authors: Zakaria Al-Qudah, Hussein A. Alzoubi, Mark Allman, Michael Rabinovich, Vincenzo Liberatore
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Web hosting providers are increasingly looking into dynamic hosting to reduce costs and improve the performance of their platforms. Instead of provisioning fixed resources to each customer, dynamic hosting maintains a variable number of application instances to satisfy current demand. While existing research in this area has mostly focused on the algorithms that decide on the number and location of application instances, we address the problem of efficient enactment of these decisions once they are made. We propose a new approach to application placement and experimentally show that it dramatically reduces the cost of application placement, which in turn improves the end-to-end agility of the hosting platform in reacting to demand changes.
Anycast-aware transport for content delivery networks
Authors: Zakaria Al-Qudah, Seungjoon Lee, Michael Rabinovich, Oliver Spatscheck, Jacobus E. van der Merwe
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Anycast-based content delivery networks (CDNs) have many properties that make them ideal for the large scale distribution of content on the Internet. However, because routing changes can result in a change of the endpoint that terminates the TCP session, TCP session disruption remains a concern for anycast CDNs, especially for large file downloads. In this paper we demonstrate that this problem does not require any complex solutions. In particular, we present the design of a simple, yet efficient, mechanism to handle session disruptions due to endpoint changes. With our mechanism, a client can continue the download of the content from the point at which it was before the endpoint change. Furthermore, CDN servers purge the TCP connection state quickly to handle frequent switching with low system overhead.
Combining global optimization with local selection for efficient QoS-aware service composition
Authors: Mohammad Alrifai, Thomas Risse
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

The run-time binding of web services has been recently put forward in order to support rapid and dynamic web service compositions. With the growing number of alternative web services that provide the same functionality but differ in quality parameters, the service composition becomes a decision problem on which component services should be selected such that user's end-to-end QoS requirements (e.g. availability, response time) and preferences (e.g. price) are satisfied. Although very efficient, local selection strategy fails short in handling global QoS requirements. Solutions based on global optimization, on the other hand, can handle global constraints, but their poor performance renders them inappropriate for applications with dynamic and real-time requirements. In this paper we address this problem and propose a solution that combines global optimization with local selection techniques to benefit from the advantages of both worlds. The proposed solution consists of two steps: first, we use mixed integer programming (MIP) to find the optimal decomposition of global QoS constraints into local constraints. Second, we use distributed local selection to find the best web services that satisfy these local constraints. The results of experimental evaluation indicate that our approach significantly outperforms existing solutions in terms of computation time while achieving close-to-optimal results.
Social search and discovery using a unified approach
Authors: Einat Amitay, David Carmel, Nadav Har&apos, El, Shila Ofek-Koifman, Aya Soffer, Sivan Yogev, Nadav Golbandi
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

We explore new ways of improving a search engine using data from Web 2.0 applications such as blogs and social bookmarks. This data contains entities such as documents, people and tags, and relationships between them. We propose a simple yet effective method, based on faceted search, that treats all entities in a unified manner: returning all of them (documents, people and tags) on every search, and allowing all of them to be used as search terms. We describe an implementation of such a social search engine on the intranet of a large enterprise, and present large-scale experiments which verify the validity of our approach.
Securely implementing open geospatial consortium web service interface standards in oracle spatial
Authors: Ning An, Raja Chatterjee, Mike Hörhammer, Siva Ravada
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

In this paper, we briefly describe the implementation of various Open Geospatial Consortium Web Service Interface Standards in Oracle Spatial 11g. We highlight how we utilize Oracle's implementation of OASIS Web Services Security (WSS) to provide a robust security framework for these OGC Web Services. We also discuss our future direction in supporting OGC Web Service Interface Standards.
Graffiti: node labeling in heterogeneous networks
Authors: Ralitsa Angelova, Gjergji Kasneci, Fabian M. Suchanek, Gerhard Weikum
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

We introduce a multi-label classification model and algorithm for labeling heterogeneous networks, where nodes belong to different types and different types have different sets of classification labels. We present a graph-based approach which models the mutual influence between nodes in the network as a random walk. When viewing class labels as "colors", the random surfer is "spraying" different node types with different color palettes; hence the name Graffiti. We demonstrate the performance gains of our method by comparing it to three state-of-the-art techniques for graph-based classification.
A game based approach to assign geographical relevance to web images
Authors: Yuki Arase, Xing Xie, Manni Duan, Takahiro Hara, Shojiro Nishio
Venue: WWW
Year: 2009

Geographical context is very important for images. Millions of images on the Web have been already assigned latitude and longitude information. Due to the rapid proliferation of such images with geographical context, it is still difficult to effectively search and browse them, since we do not have ways to decide their relevance. In this paper, we focus on the geographical relevance of images, which is defined as to what extent the main objects in an image match landmarks at the location where the image was taken. Recently, researchers have proposed to use game based approaches to label large scale data such as Web images. However, previous works have not shown the quality of collected game logs in detail and how the logs can improve existing applications. To answer these questions, we design and implement a Web-based and multi-player game to collect human knowledge while people are enjoying the game. Then we thoroughly analyze the game logs obtained during a three week study with 147 participants and propose methods to determine the image geographical relevance. In addition, we conduct an experiment to compare our methods with a commercial search engine. Experimental results show that our methods dramatically improve image search relevance. Furthermore, we show that we can derive geographically relevant objects and their salient portion in images, which is valuable for a number of applications such as image location recognition.