Comparison-Shopping Websites: An Empirical Investigation on the Influence of Decision Aids and Information Load on Consumer Decision-Making Behavior
Rapid advances in Internet commerce technology have brought about the emergence of comparison-shopping Websites, which act as agents to consolidate vast amounts of product information. Researchers have traditionally focused on incorporating the latest database interrogation technology and investigating the economic implications of the existence of comparison-shopping Websites. Little attention has been paid to understanding whether the decision aids provided are capable of assisting a consumer in managing a large quantity of information or, more importantly, are compatible with the decision-making behavior of the consumer. This study surveys several successful comparison-shopping Websites, enumerates two comercially successful forms of decision aids (i.e., screening and sorting), and examines their effects on decision effectiveness under different information loads. Based on a 3×2×2 factorial controlled experiment, we had three major findings. First, more sophisticated screening aids that assist a consumer in filtering a large quantity of information do not necessarily improve decision effectiveness. Surprisingly, our results even suggest that in some circumstances the opposite could be true. Second, the results indicate that the effectiveness of decision aids, to a large extent, depends on the information load. Third, decision makers are adaptive. One may supplement the absence of more sophisticated screening aids with the sorting aid.

title: An Investigation of Online Group-Buying Institution and Buyer Behavior
abstract: This study draws on interdependency theory to propose and assess the effects of two artifacts - conditional purchase and information cue - on decisional choice in the online group-buying context. Our results suggest that buyers presented with conditional purchase options (i.e., of not honoring the purchase when the expected discount price is not met) are more willing to make a purchase choice (i.e., deviate from an inactive inertia). Counter-intuitively, provision of information cues (i.e., information about procurement actions of the other buyers) appears to induce inaction. However, when a choice has to be made between a riskier and a less risky choice, the presence of information cues leads to a higher propensity for the riskier choice. Implications for theory and practice are further discussed.

title: Information Retrieval in Document Image Databases
abstract: With the rising popularity and importance of document images as an information source, information retrieval in document image databases has become a growing and challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an approach with the capability of matching partial word images to address two issues in document image retrieval: word spotting and similarity measurement between documents. First, each word image is represented by a primitive string. Then, an inexact string matching technique is utilized to measure the similarity between the two primitive strings generated from two word images. Based on the similarity, we can estimate how a word image is relevant to the other and, thereby, decide whether one is a portion of the other. To deal with various character fonts, we use a primitive string which is tolerant to serif and font differences to represent a word image. Using this technique of inexact string matching, our method is able to successfully handle the problem of heavily touching characters. Experimental results on a variety of document image databases confirm the feasibility, validity, and efficiency of our proposed approach in document image retrieval.

title: Improving Pronoun Resolution by Incorporating Coreferential Information of Candidates
abstract: Coreferential information of a candidate, such as the properties of its antecedents, is important for pronoun resolution because it reflects the salience of the candidate in the local discourse. Such information, however, is usually ignored in previous learning-based systems. In this paper we present a trainable model which incorporates coreferential information of candidates into pronoun resolution. Preliminary experiments show that our model will boost the resolution performance given the right antecedents of the candidates. We further discuss how to apply our model in real resolution where the antecedents of the candidate are found by a separate noun phrase resolution module. The experimental results show that our model still achieves better performance than the baseline.

title: Signature Schemes Based on 3rd Order Shift Registers
abstract: In this paper, we propose two digital signature schemes based on a third order linear feedback shift register. One of them is a normal signature scheme for signing document and the other is with encryption for intended reciever. These two signature schemes are different from most of the signature schemes which are based on discrete logarithm problem, elliptic curves discrete logarithm problem, RSA or quadratic residues. The efficient computational algorithm for computing kth term of a sequence is also presented. The advantage of these two schemes is that the computation is carried out in the ground field and not in an extension field. We also show that the security of these two signature schemes is equivalent to that of Schnorr signature scheme and Signed-ElGamal encryption scheme respectively.

title: Finding the Best-Fit Bounding-Boxes
abstract: The bounding-box of a geometric shape in 2D is the rectangle with the smallest area in a given orientation (usually upright) that complete contains the shape. The best-fit bounding-box is the smallest bounding-box among all the possible orientations for the same shape. In the context of document image analysis, the shapes can be characters (individual components) or paragraphs (component groups). This paper presents a search algorithm for the best-fit bounding-boxes of the textual component groups, whose shape are customarily rectangular in almost all languages. One of the applications of the best-fit bounding-boxes is the skew estimation from the text blocks in document images. This approach is capable of multi-skew estimation and location, as well as being able to process documents with sparse text regions. The University of Washington English Document Image Database (UW-I) is used to verify the skew estimation method directly and the proposed best-fit bounding-boxes algorithm indirectly.

title: Improving Pronoun Resolution Using Statistics-Based Semantic Compatibility Information
abstract: In this paper we focus on how to improve pronoun resolution using the statistics-based semantic compatibility information. We investigate two unexplored issues that influence the effectiveness of such information: statistics source and learning framework. Specifically, we for the first time propose to utilize the web and the twin-candidate model, in addition to the previous combination of the corpus and the single-candidate model, to compute and apply the semantic information. Our study shows that the semantic compatibility obtained from the web can be effectively incorporated in the twin-candidate learning model and significantly improve the resolution of neutral pronouns.