OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Time-dependent semantic similarity measure of queries using historical click-through data
Authors: Qiankun Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Tie-Yan Liu, Sourav S. Bhowmick, Michael R. Lyu, Wei-Ying Ma
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

It has become a promising direction to measure similarity of Web search queries by mining the increasing amount of click-through data logged by Web search engines, which record the interactions between users and the search engines. Most existing approaches employ the click-through data for similarity measure of queries with little consideration of the temporal factor, while the click-through data is often dynamic and contains rich temporal information. In this paper we present a new framework of time-dependent query semantic similarity model on exploiting the temporal characteristics of historical click-through data. The intuition is that more accurate semantic similarity values between queries can be obtained by taking into account the timestamps of the log data. With a set of user-defined calendar schema and calendar patterns, our time-dependent query similarity model is constructed using the marginalized kernel technique, which can exploit both explicit similarity and implicit semantics from the click-through data effectively. Experimental results on a large set of click-through data acquired from a commercial search engine show that our time-dependent query similarity model is more accurate than the existing approaches. Moreover, we observe that our time-dependent query similarity model can, to some extent, reflect real-world semantics such as real-world events that are happening over time.
Community discovery and analysis in blogspace
Authors: Ying Zhou, Joseph G. Davis
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

Weblog has quickly evolved into a new information and knowledge dissemination channel. Yet it is not easy to discover weblog communities through keyword search. The main contribution of this paper is the study of weblog communities from the perspective of social network analysis. We proposed a new way of collecting and preparing data for weblog community discovery. The data collection stage focuses on gaining knowledge of the strength of social ties between weblogs. The strength of social ties and the clustering feature of social network guided the discovery of weblog communities.
Selective early request termination for busy internet services
Authors: Jingyu Zhou, Tao Yang
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

Internet traffic is bursty and network servers are often overloaded with surprising events or abnormal client request patterns. This paper studies a load shedding mechanism called selective early request termination (SERT) for network services that use threads to handle multiple incoming requests continuously and concurrently. Our investigation with applications from Ask.com shows that during overloaded situations, a relatively small percentage of long requests that require excessive computing resource can dramatically affect other short requests and reduce the overall system throughput. By actively detecting and aborting overdue long requests, services can perform significantly better to achieve QoS objectives compared to a purely admission based approach. We have proposed a termination scheme that monitors running time of requests, accounts for their resource usage, adaptively adjusts the selection threshold, and performs a safe termination for a class of requests. This paper presents the design and implementation of this scheme and describes experimental results to validate the proposed approach.
Summarization of online image collections via implicit feedback
Authors: Shane Ahern, Simon King, Mor Naaman, Rahul Nair
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

The availability of map interfaces and location-aware devices makes a growing amount of unstructured, geo-referenced information available on the Web. In particular, over twelve million geo-referenced photos are now available on Flickr, a popular photo-sharing website. We show a method to analyze the Flickr data and generate aggregate knowledge in the form of "representative tags" for arbitrary areas in the world. We display these tags on a map interface in an interactive web application along with images associated with each tag. We then use the implicit feedback of the aggregate user interactions with the tags and images to learn which images best describe the area shown on the map.
Open user profiles for adaptive news systems: help or harm?
Authors: Jae-wook Ahn, Peter Brusilovsky, Jonathan Grady, Daqing He, Sue Yeon Syn
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

Over the last five years, a range of projects have focused on progressively more elaborated techniques for adaptive news delivery. However, the adaptation process in these systems has become more complicated and thus less transparent to the users. In this paper, we concentrate on the application of open user models in adding transparency and controllability to adaptive news systems. We present a personalized news system, YourNews, which allows users to view and edit their interest profiles, and report a user study on the system. Our results confirm that users prefer transparency and control in their systems, and generate more trust to such systems. However, similar to previous studies, our study demonstrate that this ability to edit user profiles may also harm the system.s performance and has to be used with caution.
Crawling multiple UDDI business registries
Authors: Eyhab Al-Masri, Qusay H. Mahmoud
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

As Web services proliferate, size and magnitude of UDDI Business Registries (UBRs) are likely to increase. The ability to discover Web services of interest then across multiple UBRs becomes a major challenge specially when using primitive search methods provided by existing UDDI APIs. Clients do not have the time to endlessly search accessible UBRs for finding appropriate services particularly when operating via mobile devices. Finding services of interest should be time effective and highly productive. This paper addresses issues relating to the efficient access and discovery of Web services across multiple UBRs and introduces a novel exploration engine, the Web Service Crawler Engine (WSCE). WSCE is capable of crawling multiple UBRs, and enables for the establishment of a centralized Web services repository that can be used for discovering Web services much more efficiently. The paper presents experimental validation, results, and analysis of the proposed ideas.
Discovering the best web service
Authors: Eyhab Al-Masri, Qusay H. Mahmoud
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

Major research challenges in discovering Web services include, provisioning of services across multiple or heterogeneous registries, differentiating between services that share similar functionalities, improving end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS), and enabling clients to customize the discovery process. Proliferation and interoperability of this multitude of Web services have lead to the emergence of new standards on how services can be published, discovered, or used (i.e. UDDI, WSDL, SOAP). Such standards can potentially provide many of these features and much more, however, there are technical challenges associated with existing standards. One of these challenges is the client.s ability to control the discovery process across accessible service registries for finding services of interest. This work proposes a solution to this problem and introduces the Web Service Relevancy Function (WsRF) used for measuring the relevancy ranking of a particular Web service based on QoS metrics and client preferences. We present experimental validation, results, and analysis of the presented ideas.
Generation, documentation and presentation of mathematical equations and symbolic scientific expressions using pure HTML and CSS
Authors: Kehinde Alabi
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

This paper describes a comprehensive method for presenting mathematical equations and expressions using only pure HTML and CSS. This method renders the equations portable and editable and contrasts with previous procedures that represent equations as whole graphic objects. Methods for generating and documenting the equations using HTML and JavaScript are also described such that the equations can be interpreted and converted to or from other formats such as LaTex, MATHML, or linear representation.
Robust methodologies for modeling web click distributions
Authors: Kamal Ali, Mark Scarr
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

Metrics such as click counts are vital to online businesses but their measurement has been problematic due to inclusion of high variance robot traffic. We posit that by applying statistical methods more rigorous than have been employed to date that we can build a robust model of thedistribution of clicks following which we can set probabilistically sound thresholds to address outliers and robots. Prior research in this domain has used inappropriate statistical methodology to model distributions and current industrial practice eschews this research for conservative ad-hoc click-level thresholds. Prevailing belief is that such distributions are scale-free power law distributions but using more rigorous statistical methods we find the best description of the data is instead provided by a scale-sensitive Zipf-Mandelbrot mixture distribution. Our results are based on ten data sets from various verticals in the Yahoo domain. Since mixture models can overfit the data we take care to use the BIC log-likelihood method which penalizes overly complex models. Using a mixture model in the web activity domain makes sense because there are likely multiple classes of users. In particular, we have noticed that there is a significantly large set of "users" that visit the Yahoo portal exactly once a day. We surmise these may be robots testing internet connectivity by pinging the Yahoo main website.
MyXDNS: a resquest routing dns server with decoupled server selection
Authors: Hussein A. Alzoubi, Michael Rabinovich, Oliver Spatscheck
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

This paper presents the architecture and the preliminary evaluation ofa request routing DNS server that decouples server selectionfrom the rest of DNS functionality. Our DNS server, which we refer toas MyXDNS, exposes well-defined APIs for uploading an externallycomputed server selection policy and for interacting with an external networkproximity service. With MyXDNS, researchers can explore their ownnetwork proximity metrics and request routing algorithms withouthaving to worry about DNS internals. Furthermore, MyXDNS is based onopen-source MyDNS and is available to public. Stress-testing of MyXDNSindicated that it achieves its flexibility at an acceptable cost: asingle MyXDNS running on a low-level server can process 3000 req/secwith sub-millisecond response even in the presence of continuousupdates to server selection policy.
Monitoring the evolution of cached content in Google and MSN
Authors: Ioannis Anagnostopoulos
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

In this paper, we describe a capture-recapture experiment conducted on Google's and MSN's cached directories. The anticipated outcome of this work was to monitor evolution rates in these web search services as well as measure their ability to index and maintain fresh and up-to-date results in their cached directories.
XML-based multimodal interaction framework for contact center applications
Authors: Nikolay A. Anisimov, Brian Galvin, Herbert Ristock
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

In this paper, we consider a way to represent contact center applications as a set of multiple XML documents written in different markups including VoiceXML and CCXML. Applications can comprise a dialog with IVR, call routing and agent scripting functionalities. We also consider ways how such applications can be executed in run-time contact center environment.
The two cultures: mashing up web 2.0 and the semantic web
Authors: Anupriya Ankolekar, Markus Krötzsch, Thanh Tran, Denny Vrandecic
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

A common perception is that there are two competing visions for the future evolution of the Web: the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. A closer look, though, reveals that the core technologies and concerns of these two approaches are complementary and that each field can and must draw from the other's strengths. We believe that future web applications will retain the Web 2.0 focus on community and usability, while drawing on Semantic Web infrastructure to facilitate mashup-like information sharing. However, there are several open issues that must be addressed before such applications can become commonplace. In this paper, we outline a semantic weblogs scenario that illustrates the potential for combining Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies, while highlighting the unresolved issues that impede its realization. Nevertheless, we believe that the scenario can be realized in the short-term. We point to recent progress made in resolving each of the issues as well as future research directions for each of the communities.
Is high-quality vod feasible using P2P swarming?
Authors: Siddhartha Annapureddy, Saikat Guha, Christos Gkantsidis, Dinan Gunawardena, Pablo Rodriguez
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

Peer-to-peer technologies are increasingly becoming the medium of choice for delivering media content, both professional and homegrown, to large user populations. Indeed, current P2P swarming systems have been shown to be very efficient for large-scale content distribution with few server resources. However, such systems have been designed for generic file distribution and provide a limited user experience for viewing media content. For example, users need to wait to download the full video before they can start watching it. In general, the main challenge resides in designing systems that ensure that users can start watching a movie at any point in time, with small start-up times and sustainable playback rates. In this work, we address the issues of providing a Video-on-Demand (VoD) using P2P mesh-based networks. We show that providing high quality VoD using P2P is feasible using a combination of techniques including (a) network coding, (b) optimized resource allocation across different parts of the video, and (c) overlay topology management algorithms. Our evaluation also shows that systems that do not optimize in all these dimensions could significantly under-utilize the network resources resulting in poor VoD performance. We present our results based on simulations and a prototype implementation. Categories and Subject Descriptors
SPARQ2L: towards support for subgraph extraction queries in rdf databases
Authors: Kemafor Anyanwu, Angela Maduko, Amit P. Sheth
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

Many applications in analytical domains often have the need to "connect the dots" i.e., query about the structure of data. In bioinformatics for example, it is typical to want to query about interactions between proteins. The aim of such queries is to "extract" relationships between entities i.e. paths from a data graph. Often, such queries will specify certain constraints that qualifying results must satisfy e.g. paths involving a set of mandatory nodes. Unfortunately, most present day Semantic Web query languages including the current draft of the anticipated recommendation SPARQL, lack the ability to express queries about arbitrary path structures in data. In addition, many systems that support some limited form of path queries rely on main memory graph algorithms limiting their applicability to very large scale graphs. In this paper, we present an approach for supporting Path Extraction queries. Our proposal comprises (i) a query language SPARQ2L which extends SPARQL with path variables and path variable constraint expressions, and (ii) a novel query evaluation framework based on efficient algebraic techniques for solving path problems which allows for path queries to be efficiently evaluated on disk resident RDF graphs. The effectiveness of our proposal is demonstrated by a performance evaluation of our approach on both real world based and synthetic dataset.
Providing session management as core business service
Authors: Ismail Ari, Jun Li, Riddhiman Ghosh, Mohamed Dekhil
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

It is extremely hard for a global organization with services over multiple channels to capture a consistent and unified view of its data, services, and interactions. While SOA and web services are addressing integration and interoperability problems, it is painful for an operational organization with legacy systems to quickly switch to service-based methods. We need methods to combine advantages of traditional (i.e. web, desktop, or mobile) application development environments and service-based deployments.In this paper, we focus on the design and implementation of session management as a core service to support business processes and go beyond application-specific sessions and web sessions. We develop local session components for different platforms and complement them with a remote "session service" that is independent of applications and platforms. We aim to close the gap between the two worlds by combining their performance, availability and interoperability advantages.
Integrating value-based requirement engineering models to webml using vip business modeling framework
Authors: Farooque Azam, Li Zhang, Rashid Ahmad
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

Requirement engineering (RE) is emerging as an increasingly important discipline for supporting Web application development, as these are designed to satisfy diverse stakeholder needs, additional functional, information, multimedia and usability requirements as compared to traditional software applications. Moreover, when considering innovative e-commerce applications, value-based RE is an extremely relevant methodology which exploits the concept of economic value during the RE activity. In contrast, most of the methodologies proposed for the development of Web applications, primarily focus on the system design, and paying less attention to the RE, and specifically to value-based RE. Focusing this aspect, the paper presents integration of value-based RE models to WebML models using our recently proposed VIP Business Modeling Framework [1]. We also analyze the framework's potential in linking other modeling approaches, and argue about its significant integration potential with various E-R/OO-based, process aware Web modeling approaches.
On building graphs of documents with artificial ants
Authors: Hanane Azzag, Julien Lavergne, Christiane Guinot, Gilles Venturini
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

We present an incremental algorithm for building a neighborhood graph from a set of documents. This algorithm is based on a population of artificial agents that imitate the way real ants build structures with self-assembly behaviors. We show that our method outperforms standard algorithms for building such neighborhood graphs (up to 2230 times faster on the tested databases with equal quality) and how the user may interactively explore the graph.
BlogScope: spatio-temporal analysis of the blogosphere
Authors: Nilesh Bansal, Nick Koudas
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

We present BlogScope (www.blogscope.net), a system for analyzing the Blogosphere. BlogScope is an information discovery and text analysis system that offers a set of unique features. Such features include, spatio-temporal analysis of blogs, flexible navigation of the Blogosphere through information bursts, keyword correlations and burst synopsis, as well as enhanced ranking functions for improved query answer relevance. We describe the system, its design and the features of the current version of BlogScope.
Efficient search engine measurements
Authors: Ziv Bar-Yossef, Maxim Gurevich
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

We address the problem of measuring global quality met-rics of search engines, like corpus size, index freshness, anddensity of duplicates in the corpus. The recently proposedestimators for such metrics [2, 6] suffer from significant biasand/or poor performance, due to inaccurate approximationof the so called .document degrees..We present two new estimators that are able to overcomethe bias introduced by approximate degrees. Our estimatorsare based on a careful implementation of an approximateimportance sampling procedure. Comprehensive theoreti-cal and empirical analysis of the estimators demonstratesthat they have essentially no bias even in situations wheredocument degrees are poorly approximated.Building on an idea from [6], we discuss Rao Blackwelliza-tion as a generic method for reducing variance in searchengine estimators. We show that Rao-Blackwellizing ourestimators results in significant performance improvements,while not compromising accuracy.
Do not crawl in the dust: different urls with similar text
Authors: Ziv Bar-Yossef, Idit Keidar, Uri Schonfeld
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

We consider the problem of DUST: Different URLs with Similar Text. Such duplicate URLs are prevalent in web sites, as web server software often uses aliases and redirections, and dynamically generates the same page from various different URLrequests. We present a novel algorithm, DustBuster, for uncovering DUST; that is, for discovering rules that transform a given URL to others that are likely to have similar content. DustBuster mines DUST effectively from previous crawl logs or web server logs, without examining page contents. Verifying these rules via sampling requires fetching few actual web pages. Search engines can benefit from information about DUST to increase the effectiveness of crawling, reduce indexing overhead, and improve the quality of popularity statistics such as PageRank.
Combining classifiers to identify online databases
Authors: Luciano Barbosa, Juliana Freire
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

We address the problem of identifying the domain of onlinedatabases. More precisely, given a set F of Web forms automaticallygathered by a focused crawler and an online databasedomain D, our goal is to select from F only the formsthat are entry points to databases in D. Having a set ofWebforms that serve as entry points to similar online databasesis a requirement for many applications and techniques thataim to extract and integrate hidden-Web information, suchas meta-searchers, online database directories, hidden-Webcrawlers, and form-schema matching and merging.We propose a new strategy that automatically and accuratelyclassifies online databases based on features that canbe easily extracted from Web forms. By judiciously partitioningthe space of form features, this strategy allows theuse of simpler classifiers that can be constructed using learningtechniques that are better suited for the features of eachpartition. Experiments using real Web data in a representativeset of domains show that the use of different classifiersleads to high accuracy, precision and recall. This indicatesthat our modular classifier composition provides an effectiveand scalable solution for classifying online databases.
An adaptive crawler for locating hiddenwebentry points
Authors: Luciano Barbosa, Juliana Freire
Venue: WWW
Year: 2007

In this paper we describe new adaptive crawling strategies to efficiently locate the entry points to hidden-Web sources. The fact that hidden-Web sources are very sparsely distributedmakes the problem of locating them especially challenging. We deal with this problem by using the contents ofpages to focus the crawl on a topic; by prioritizing promisinglinks within the topic; and by also following links that may not lead to immediate benefit. We propose a new frameworkwhereby crawlers automatically learn patterns of promisinglinks and adapt their focus as the crawl progresses, thus greatly reducing the amount of required manual setup andtuning. Our experiments over real Web pages in a representativeset of domains indicate that online learning leadsto significant gains in harvest rates' the adaptive crawlers retrieve up to three times as many forms as crawlers thatuse a fixed focus strategy.