waashk/acm huggingface dataset:
ocelot: a system for summarizing web pages  we introduce ocelot, a prototype system for automatically generating the "gist" of a web page by summarizing it. although most text summarization research to date has focused on the task of news articles, web pages are quite different in both structure and content. instead of coherent text with a well- defined discourse structure, they are more often likely to be a chaotic jumble of phrases, links, graphics and formatting commands. such text provides little foothold for extractive summarization techniques, which attempt to generate a summary of a document by excerpting a contiguous, coherent span of text from it. this paper builds upon recent work in _non-extractive_ summarization, producing the gist of a web page by "translating" it into a more concise representation rather than attempting to extract a text span verbatim. ocelot uses probabilistic models to guide it in selecting and ordering words into a gist. this paper describes a technique for learning these models automatically from a collection of human-summarized web pages.  adam l. berger vibhu o. mittal
auto-summarization of audio-video presentations  as streaming audio- video technology becomes widespread, there is a dramatic increase in the amount of multimedia content available on the net. users face a new challenge: how to examine large amounts of multimedia content quickly. one technique that can enable quick overview of multimedia is video summaries; that is, a shorter version assembled by picking important segments from the original.  we evaluate three techniques for automatic creation of summaries for online audio-video presentations. these techniques exploit information in the audio signal (e.g., pitch and pause information), knowledge of slide transition points in the presentation, and information about access patterns of previous users. we report a user study that compares automatically generated summaries that are 20%-25% the length of full presentations to author generated summaries. users learn from the computer- generated summaries, although less than from authors' summaries. they initially find computer-generated summaries less coherent, but quickly grow accustomed to them.  liwei he elizabeth sanocki anoop gupta jonathan grudin
finding relevant passages using noun-noun compounds (poster session): coherence vs. proximity  intuitively, words forming phrases are a more precise description of content than words as a sequence of keywords. yet, evidence that phrases would be more effective for information retrieval is inconclusive. this paper isolates a neglected class of phrases, that is abundant in communication, has an established theoretical foundation, and shows promise for an effective expression of the user's information need: the noun-noun compound (_nnc_). in an experiment, a variety of meaningful _nnc_s were used to isolate relevant passages in a large and varied corpus. in a first pass, passages were retrieved based on textual proximity of the words or their semantic peers. a second pass retained only passages containing a syntactically coherent structure equivalent to the original _nnc_. this second pass showed a dramatic increase in precision. preliminary results show the validity of our intuition about phrases in the special but very productive case of _nnc_s.  eduard hoenkamp rob de groot
a layered architecture for querying dynamic web content  the design of webbases, database systems for supporting web- based applications, is currently an active area of research. in this paper, we propose a 3-year architecture for designing and implementing webbases for querying dynamic web content(i.e., data that can only be extracted by filling out multiple forms). the lowest layer, virtual physical layer, provides navigation independence by shielding the user from the complexities associated with retrieving data from raw web sources. next, the traditional logical layer supports site independence. the top layer is analogous to the external schema layer in traditional databases.  within this architectural framework we address two problems unique to webbases --- retrieving dynamic web content in the virtual physical layer and querying of the external schema by the end user. the layered architecture makes it possible to automate data extraction to a much greater degree than in existing proposals. wrappers for the virtual physical schema can be created semi- automatically, by asking the webbase designer to navigate through the sites of interest --- we call this approach mapping by example. thus, the webbase designer need not have expertise in the language that maps the physical schema to the raw web (this should be contrasted to other approaches, which require expertise in various web-enabled flavors of sql). for the external schema layer, we propose a semantic extension of the universal relation interface. this interface provides powerful, yet reasonably simple, ad hoc querying capabilities for the end user compared to the currently prevailing "canned" form-based interfaces on the one hand or complex web-enabling extensions of sql on the other. finally, we discuss the implementation of the proposed architecture.  hasan davulcu juliana freire michael kifer i. v. ramakrishnan
conversation-based mail  a new message communication paradigm based on conversations that provides an alternative to memo\\- and conference-based mail is described. a conversation- based message system groups messages into conversations, and orders messages within a conversation according to the context in which they were written. the message context relation leads to an efficient implementation of conversations in a distributed environment and supports a natural ordering of messages when viewed by the user. experience with a prototype demonstrates the workability of conversation-based mail and suggests that conversations provide a powerful tool for message communication.  douglas e. comer larry l. peterson
integration of interpersonal space and shared workspace: clearboard design and experiments  we describe the evolution of the novel shared drawing medium clearboard which was designed to seamlessly integrate an interpersonal space and a shared workspace. clearboard permits coworkers in two locations to draw with color markers or with electronic pens and software tools while maintaining direct eye contact and the ability to employ natural gestures. the clearboard design is based on the key metaphor of "talking through and drawing on a transparent glass window." we describe the evolution from clearboard-1 (which enables shared video drawing) to clearboard-2 (which incorporates teampaint, a multiuser paint editor). initial observations and findings gained through the experimental use of the prototype, including the feature of "gaze awareness," are discussed. further experiments are conducted with clearboard-0 (a simple mockup), clearboard-1, and an actual desktop as a control. in the settings we examined, the clearboard environment led to more eye contact and potential awareness of collaborator's gaze direction over the traditional desktop environment.  hiroshi ishii minoru kobayashi jonathan grudin
farming the web for systematic business intelligence (invited talk. abstract only)  the technologies of data warehousing, data mining, hypertext analysis, information visualization, and web information resources are rapidly converging. the challenge is to architect these technologies into a system for systematic business intelligence for a corporation. we need to move from an information refining process that is often haphazard and narrow to one that is reliable and continuous. web farming is a new area that suggests a methodology and architecture for accomplishing this.  richard hackathorn
any algorithm in the complex object algebra with powerset needs exponential space to compute transitive closure  the abiteboul and beeri algebra for complex objects can express a query whose meaning is transitive closure, but the algorithm is naturally associated to this query needs exponential space. we show that any other query in the algebra which expresses transitive closure needs exponential space. this proves that in general the powerset is an intractable operator for implementing fixpoint queries.  dan suciu jan paredaens
a sophisticated microcomputer user interface  the design and implementation of a menu-oriented interface for personal computers is discussed. factors pertaining to the cognitive limitations of users are examined and their impact on the design of the system is described. the major attributes of the system are (1) all communication between the operator and the computer is through menus or forms (which are analogous to hard copy documents); (2) extensive help is available at all times; (3) the interface can adapt to the experience of the user; (4) the display processing time is short; and (5) an external data format exists that completely defines the interface. the various components of the interface are discussed in detail, followed by a discussion of the implementation.  richard snodgrass
automatic generation of textual, audio, and animated help in uide: the user interface design  research on automatic help generation fails to match the advance in user interface technology. with users and interfaces becoming increasingly sophisticated, generating help information must be presented with a close tie to the current work context. help research also needs to utilize the media technology to become effective in conveying information to users. our work on automatic generation of help from user interface specifications attempts to bridge the gaps, both between help and user interface making help truly sensitive to the interface context, and between the help media and the interface media making communication more direct and more effective. our work previously reported emphasized a shared knowledge representation for both user interface and help, and an architecture for automatic generation of context- sensitive animated help in smalltalk-80. this paper presents a new integrated architecture in c++ which not only generates animation, but also audio as procedural help. the architecture also uses the knowledge representation to automatically provide textual help of why an object in an interface is disabled.  piyawadee noi sukaviriya jeyakumar muthukumarasamy anton spaans hans j. j. de graaff
a direct manipulation interface for boolean information retrieval via natural language query  this paper describes the design of a direct manipulation user interface for boolean information retrieval. intended to overcome the difficulties of manipulating explicit boolean queries as well as the "black box" drawbacks of so-called natural language query systems, the interface presents a two- dimensional graphical representation of a user's natural language query which not only exposes heuristic query transformations performed by the system, but also supports query reformulation by the user via direct manipulation of the representation. the paper illustrates the operation of the interface as implemented in the ai- stars full-text information retrieval system.  p. g. anick j. d. brennan r. a. flynn d. r. hanssen b. alvey j. m. robbins
natural command names and initial learning: a study of text-editing terms  in the first of two studies of "naturalness" in command names, computer-naive typists composed instructions to "someone else" for correcting a sample text. there was great variety in their task-descriptive lexicon and a lack of correspondence between both their vocabulary and their underlying conceptions of the editing operations and those of some computerized text editors. in the second study, computer-naive typists spent two hours learning minimal text- editing systems that varied in several ways. lexical naturalness (frequency of use in study 1) made little difference in their performance. by contrast, having different, rather than the same names for operations requiring different syntax greatly reduced difficulty. it is concluded that the design of user-compatible commands involves deeper issues than are captured by the slogan "naturalness." however, there are limitations to our observations. only initial learning of a small set of commands was at issue and generalizations to other situations will require further testing.  t. k. landauer k. m. galotti s. hartwell
a test-bed for user interface designs  most presently available interactive computer interfaces treat their users in an unfriendly, uncooperative, and inflexible way, resulting in feelings of frustration and a conseqeuent loss of productivity for the users. these problems have led to attempts (e.g. [6, 8, 12, 13]) to make interfaces appear more friendly and cooperative through the addition of advanced interface features such as spelling correction, on-line help, personalized defaults, etc.. while common- sense suggests such features may be helpful, there is little hard evidence about how helpful they are or whether they are worth the overheads they entail. a primary reason for this lack of information is the practical difficulty of experimentation. many of these features are time- consuming to implement, are usually implemented without adequate instrumentation, and are implemented in different and difficult to compare ways from system to system (see [10], for example). these problems in evaluation suggest the need for a test-bed interface in which various advanced features could be tried out in a consistent and adequately instrumented way with a variety of application systems. in this paper, we present a detailed rationale and a partially implemented design for a test-bed of this kind.  eugene ball phil hayes
security of statistical databases: multidimensional transformation  statistical evaluation of databases which contain personal records may entail risks for the confidentiality of the individual records. the risk has increased with the availability of flexible interactive evaluation programs which permit the use of trackers, the most dangerous class of snooping tools known. a class of trackers, called union trackers, is described. they permit reconstruction of the entire database without supplementary knowledge and include the general tracker recently described as a special case. for many real statistical databases the overwhelming majority of definable sets of records will form trackers. for such databases a random search for a tracker is likely to succeed rapidly. individual trackers are redefined and counted and their cardinalities are investigated. if there are n records in the database, then most individual trackers employ innocent cardinalities near n/3, making them difficult to detect. disclosure with trackers usually requires little effort per retrieved data element.  jan schlöer
chickens and eggs - the interrelationship of systems and theory  this paper describes a personal perspective of the kinds of contributions that systems research and theoretical research make to one another particularly in the database area. examples of each kind of contribution are given, and then several case studies from the author a personal experience are presented. the case studies illustrate database systems research where theoretical work contributed to systems results and vice versa. areas of database systems which need more contributions from the theoretical community will also be presented.  p. selinger
seave: a mechanism for verifying user presuppositions in query systems  every information system incorporates a database component, and a frequent activity of users of information systems is to present it with queries. these queries reflect the presuppositions of their authors about the system and the information it contains. with most query processors, queries that are based on erroneous presuppositions often result in null answers. these fake nulls are misleading, since they do not point out the user's erroneous presuppositions (and can even be interpreted as their affirmation). this article describes the seave mechanism for extracting presuppositions from queries and verifying their correctness. the verification is done against three repositories of information: the actual data, their integrity constraints, and their completeness assertions. consequently, queries that reflect erroneous presuppositions are answered with informative messages instead of null answers, and user-system communication is thus improved (an aspect that is particularly important in systems that often are accessed by naive users). first, the principles of seave are described abstractly. then, specific algorithms for implementing it with relational databases are presented, including a new method for storing knowledge and an efficient algorithm for processing queries against the knowledge.  amihai motro
partitioned signature files: design issues and performance evaluation  a signature file acts as a filtering mechanism to reduce the amount of text that needs to be searched for a query. unfortunately, the signature file itself must be exhaustively searched, resulting in degraded performance for a large file size. we propose to use a deterministic algorithm to divide a signature file into partitions, each of which contains signatures with the same "key." the signature keys in a partition can be extracted and represented as the partition's key. the search can then be confined to the subset of partitions whose keys match the query key. our main concern here is to study methods for obtaining the keys and their performance in terms of their ability to reduce the search space.  owing to the reduction of search space, partitioning a signature file has a direct benefit in a sequential search (single-processor) environment. in a parallel environment, search can be conducted in parallel effectively by allocating one or more partitions to a processor. partitioning the signature tile with a deterministic method (as opposed to a random partitioning scheme) provides intraquery parallelism as well as interquery parallelism.  in this paper, we outline the criteria for evaluating partitioning schemes. three algorithms are described and studied. an analytical study of the performance of the algorithms is provided and the results are verified with simulation.  dik lun lee chun-wu leng
experiences with workflow management: issues for the next generation  workflow management is a technology that is considered strategically important by many businesses, and its market growth shows no signs of abating. it is, however, often viewed with skepticism by the research community, conjuring up visions of oppressed workers performing rigidly-defined tasks on an assembly line. although the potential for abuse no doubt exists, workflow management can instead be used to help individuals manage their work and to provide a clear context for performing that work. a key challenge in the realization of this ideal is the reconciliation of workflow process models and software with the rich variety of activities and behaviors that comprise "real" work. our experiences with the inconcert workflow management system are used as a basis for outlining several issues that will need to be addressed in meeting this challenge. this is intended as an invitation to cscw researchers to influence this important technology in a constructive manner by drawing on research and experience.  kenneth r. abbott sunil k. sarin
power to the people: end-user building of digital library collections  naturally, digital library systems focus principally on the reader: th e consumer of the material that constitutes the library. in contrast, this paper describes an interface that makes it easy for people to build their own library collections. collections may be built and served locally from the user's own web server, or (given appropriate permissions) remotely on a shared digital library host. end users can easily build new collections styled after existing ones from material on the web or from their local files-or both, and collections can be updated and new ones brought on-line at any time. the interface, which is intended for non-professional end users, is modeled after widely used commercial software installation packages. lest one quail at the prospect of end users building their own collections on a shared system, we also describe an interface for the administrative user who is responsible for maintaining a digital library installation.  ian h. witten david bainbridge stefan j. boddie
the organizational implementation of an electronic meeting system: an analysis of the innovation process  electronic meeting systems (ems) are slowly moving out of university environments into work organizations. they constitute an innovative method of supporting group meetings. this paper reports on the innovation process in one organization that has recently adopted and implemented an ems. the paper traces the innovation process through four stages: conception of an idea: proposal; decision to adopt; and implementation. important factors from the innovation literature are considered as explanators of the innovation process involving ems in this particular organization.  joey f. george joseph s. valacich j. f. nunamaker
architecture of a networked image search and retrieval system  large scale networked image retrieval systems face a number of problems that are not fully satisfied by current systems. on one hand, integrated solutions that store all image data centrally are often limited in terms of scalability and autonomy of data providers. on the other hand, www-based search engines proved to be fairly scalable, and data providers retain their autonomy. however, such engines often confront users with links to servers that are not available or to images that no longer exist, i.e., they are unable to keep their meta- database consistent with the repositories' contents. furthermore, existing solutions often neglect the cost of image delivery. the considerable variations in the effective bandwidth in today's internet lead to highly unpredictable response times, which are often intolerable from the user's point of view.  this paper presents the architecture of chariot, a networked image search and retrieval system that tackles these concerns. with respect to scalability and autonomy, chariot follows the approach of www-based search engines by maintaining only the meta-data in a central database. various specialized components (feature extraction, indexes, images servers) are coordinated by a middleware component that employs transactional process management to enforce consistency between the meta-data and all components. moreover, chariot incorporates mechanisms to provide more predictable response times for the image delivery over the internet by employing network- aware image servers. these servers trade off the quality of the images to be delivered with the bandwidth required to transmit the images.  r. weber j. bollinger t. gross h.-j. schek
data mining case study: modeling the behavior of offenders who commit serious sexual assaults this paper looks at the use of a self organizing map (som), to link of records of crimes of serious sexual attacks. once linked a profile can be derived of the offender(s) responsible.the data was drawn from the major crimes database at the national crime faculty of the national police staff college bramshill uk. the data was encoded from text by a small team of specialists working to a well-defined protocol. the encoded data was analyzed using soms. two exercises were conducted. these resulted in the linking of several offences in to clusters each of which were sufficiently similar to have possibly been committed by the same offender(s). a number of clusters were used to form profiles of offenders. some of these profiles were confirmed by independent analysts as either belonging to known offenders or appeared sufficiently interesting to warrant further investigation.the prototype was developed over 10 weeks. this contrasts with an in-house study using a conventional approach, which took 2 years to reach similar results. as a consequence of this study the ncf intends to pursue an in-depth follow up study. richard adderley peter b. musgrove