Matching Items (2)
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Description
Source selection is one of the foremost challenges for searching deep-web. For a user query, source selection involves selecting a subset of deep-web sources expected to provide relevant answers to the user query. Existing source selection models employ query-similarity based local measures for assessing source quality. These local measures are

Source selection is one of the foremost challenges for searching deep-web. For a user query, source selection involves selecting a subset of deep-web sources expected to provide relevant answers to the user query. Existing source selection models employ query-similarity based local measures for assessing source quality. These local measures are necessary but not sufficient as they are agnostic to source trustworthiness and result importance, which, given the autonomous and uncurated nature of deep-web, have become indispensible for searching deep-web. SourceRank provides a global measure for assessing source quality based on source trustworthiness and result importance. SourceRank's effectiveness has been evaluated in single-topic deep-web environments. The goal of the thesis is to extend sourcerank to a multi-topic deep-web environment. Topic-sensitive sourcerank is introduced as an effective way of extending sourcerank to a deep-web environment containing a set of representative topics. In topic-sensitive sourcerank, multiple sourcerank vectors are created, each biased towards a representative topic. At query time, using the topic of query keywords, a query-topic sensitive, composite sourcerank vector is computed as a linear combination of these pre-computed biased sourcerank vectors. Extensive experiments on more than a thousand sources in multiple domains show 18-85% improvements in result quality over Google Product Search and other existing methods.
ContributorsJha, Manishkumar (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
This study explored the Web resources used by four students enrolled in an introductory university-level Medical Translation course over a period of one semester. The research examined the students’ use of time, information needs and searches, and whether user attributes (translation experience and training, specialization and familiarity with the text,

This study explored the Web resources used by four students enrolled in an introductory university-level Medical Translation course over a period of one semester. The research examined the students’ use of time, information needs and searches, and whether user attributes (translation experience and training, specialization and familiarity with the text, previous Web search training, and effort) or task-related factors (perceived task difficulty) had a relationship with the Web searching behavior of the participants. The study also investigates how this behavior might have been reflected in the quality of the product. The study focused on two translation tasks extracted from medical texts selected by the instructor that had to be translated from English into Spanish. Data was gathered by means of various instruments: translated texts, Think-Aloud Protocols, computer screen recordings, and questionnaires. The results of the data gathered from these instruments were triangulated in an effort to find relationships between the translation process and the translation product. Results were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively.

The findings of the study revealed that the students spent a considerable amount of time looking for information on the Web during their translation assignments, and that the students exhibited an inclination toward bilingual Web sources. An analysis of user attributes suggested that translation experience might have had a relationship with the resources used, and the frequency of their use. Data showed that the more experienced students in the translation program received higher scores in their translations. It was also found that the higher the level of familiarity with the topic, the fewer the number of total searches. In addition, previous Web search training appeared to have a relationship with where and how information was sought. It was observed that in one of the two translation tasks, the more effort the students declared, the more Web searches they carried out. A look at perceived task difficulty indicated that in one of two tasks, this factor had an impact on the number of Web searches, which in turn, seemed to influence the time spent on the translation process, and the translation scores.
ContributorsFernández, Ofelia (Author) / Lafford, Barbara A. (Thesis advisor) / Beaudrie, Sara M. (Committee member) / Cerrón-Palomino, Álvaro U (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015