Social Information Access


Book Description

Social information access is defined as a stream of research that explores methods for organizing the past interactions of users in a community in order to provide future users with better access to information. Social information access covers a wide range of different technologies and strategies that operate on a different scale, which can range from a small closed corpus site to the whole Web. The 16 chapters included in this book provide a broad overview of modern research on social information access. In order to provide a balanced coverage, these chapters are organized by the main types of information access (i.e., social search, social navigation, and recommendation) and main sources of social information.







Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks


Book Description

This open access book summarizes the first two decades of the NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also how it was done and the impact it has achieved. For example, in some chapters the reader sees the early seeds of what eventually grew to be the search engines that provide access to content on the World Wide Web, todays smartphones that can tailor what they show to the needs of their owners, and the smart speakers that enrich our lives at home and on the move. We also get glimpses into how new search engines can be built for mathematical formulae, or for the digital record of a lived human life. Key to the success of the NTCIR endeavor was early recognition that information access research is an empirical discipline and that evaluation therefore lay at the core of the enterprise. Evaluation is thus at the heart of each chapter in this book. They show, for example, how the recognition that some documents are more important than others has shaped thinking about evaluation design. The thirty-three contributors to this volume speak for the many hundreds of researchers from dozens of countries around the world who together shaped NTCIR as organizers and participants. This book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, and students--anyone who wants to learn about past and present evaluation efforts in information retrieval, information access, and natural language processing, as well as those who want to participate in an evaluation task or even to design and organize one.







Information Access through Search Engines and Digital Libraries


Book Description

The Information Management Systems group at the University of Padua has been a major contributor to information retrieval (IR) and digital libraries. The papers in this book include coverage of automated text categorizations, web link analysis algorithms, retrieval in multimedia digital libraries, and multilingual information retrieval. The text will appeal to institutions and companies working on search engines and information retrieval algorithms.




Beyond Broadband Access


Book Description

After broadband access, what next? What role do metrics play in understanding “information societies”? And, more important, in shaping their policies? Beyond counting people with broadband access, how can economic and social metrics inform broadband policies, help evaluate their outcomes, and create useful models for achieving national goals? This timely volume not only examines the traditional questions about broadband, like availability and access, but also explores and evaluates new metrics more applicable to the evolving technologies of information access. Beyond Broadband Access brings together a stellar array of media policy scholars from a wide range of disciplines—economics, law, policy studies, computer science, information science, and communications studies. Importantly, it provides a well-rounded, international perspective on theoretical approaches to databased communications policymaking in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Showcasing a diversity of approaches, this invaluable collection helps to meet myriad challenges to improving the foundations for communications policy development.







Textual Information Access


Book Description

This book presents statistical models that have recently been developed within several research communities to access information contained in text collections. The problems considered are linked to applications aiming at facilitating information access: - information extraction and retrieval; - text classification and clustering; - opinion mining; - comprehension aids (automatic summarization, machine translation, visualization). In order to give the reader as complete a description as possible, the focus is placed on the probability models used in the applications concerned, by highlighting the relationship between models and applications and by illustrating the behavior of each model on real collections. Textual Information Access is organized around four themes: informational retrieval and ranking models, classification and clustering (regression logistics, kernel methods, Markov fields, etc.), multilingualism and machine translation, and emerging applications such as information exploration. Contents Part 1: Information Retrieval 1. Probabilistic Models for Information Retrieval, Stéphane Clinchant and Eric Gaussier. 2. Learnable Ranking Models for Automatic Text Summarization and Information Retrieval, Massih-Réza Amini, David Buffoni, Patrick Gallinari, Tuong Vinh Truong and Nicolas Usunier. Part 2: Classification and Clustering 3. Logistic Regression and Text Classification, Sujeevan Aseervatham, Eric Gaussier, Anestis Antoniadis, Michel Burlet and Yves Denneulin. 4. Kernel Methods for Textual Information Access, Jean-Michel Renders. 5. Topic-Based Generative Models for Text Information Access, Jean-Cédric Chappelier. 6. Conditional Random Fields for Information Extraction, Isabelle Tellier and Marc Tommasi. Part 3: Multilingualism 7. Statistical Methods for Machine Translation, Alexandre Allauzen and François Yvon. Part 4: Emerging Applications 8. Information Mining: Methods and Interfaces for Accessing Complex Information, Josiane Mothe, Kurt Englmeier and Fionn Murtagh. 9. Opinion Detection as a Topic Classification Problem, Juan-Manuel Torres-Moreno, Marc El-Bèze, Patrice Bellot and Fréderic Béchet.




Digital Libraries and Information Access


Book Description

An authoritative and truly global exploration of current research in digital libraries. Internationally-renowned academics discuss what has been achieved with digital libraries and what we can expect in the future through the prism of research. The increasing number of digital libraries in all sectors and the pressure of ever demanding and diverse user needs has encouraged development of user-centred interfaces, intelligent search and retrieval capabilities, effective metadata description and contents organization. In addition to the two editors who are renowned for their works in digital library research, this collection brings together established international names in the field to analyse these developments in relation to users and information access and the future trends and challenges that practitioners will face. Readership: LIS students, academics and researchers interested in digital libraries and access and those developing, managing or just starting out with digital libraries




Information Access and Adaptive Technology


Book Description

This practical new guide is designed to help school officials put students and staff with disabilities on a "level playing field" with everyone else, in computer labs, in libraries, and in classrooms. Rather than merely focusing on specific types of hardware and software, the authors discuss how to set up the infrastructure necessary to provide technology and support. They cover computer access issues, as well as the use of computer-based compensatory tools - special adaptive technology designed to enable individuals with disabilities to participate more independently in the academic environment. The authors describe which services should be provided, how to plan them, and the types of equipment available to meet different needs. They also offer examples of seven model programs now in place in libraries and on university campuses. Additional resources on adaptive technology are listed in the appendixes. This book will serve as an excellent guide for college and university administrators, computer lab staff, librarians, disabled student services staff, and faculty members.