The study investigated the relationship among three cognitive styles and summarization abilities. Both summarization products and processes were examined. Summarizing products were scored and a canonical correlation analysis was performed to determine their relationship with three cognitive styles. Summarizing processes were examined by videotaping students as they provided think aloud protocols. Their processes were recorded on composing style sheets and analyzed qualitatively. Subjects were sixth-grade students in self-contained classes in a suburban school district. Summarizing products were collected over a two week period in the fall. Summarizing processes were collected over an eight week period in the spring of the same school year. The results of the summarizing products analysis suggest that cognitive styles are related to summarization abilities. Two canonical correlations among the two variable sets were statistically significant at the .05 level of significance (.33 and .29). The results further suggest that students who are field independent, reflective, and flexible in their attentional style may be more adept at organizing their ideas and using written mechanics while summarizing. Students who are impulsive and constricted in attentional style may exhibit strength in expressing their ideas while summarizing. Results of the summarizing processes analysis suggest that students of one cognitive style combination may exhibit different behaviors while summarizing than those of other cognitive style combinations. Students who are field independent, reflective, and flexible in their attentional style seem to display more mature, interactive behaviors while summarizing than their peers of other cognitive style combinations.

published_or_final_version / Computer Science and Information Systems / Master / Master of Philosophy

A digital library is a collection of services and information objects for storing, accessing, and retrieving digital objects. Automatic text summarization presents salient information in a condensed form suitable for user needs. This thesis amalgamates digital libraries and automatic text summarization by extending the Greenstone Digital Library software suite to include the University of Lethbridge Summarizer. The tool generates summaries, nouns, and non phrases for use as metadata for searching and browsing digital collections. Digital collections of newspapers, PDFs, and eBooks were created with summary metadata. PDF documents were processed the fastest at 1.8 MB/hr, followed by the newspapers at 1.3 MB/hr, with eBooks being the slowest at 0.9 MV/hr. Qualitative analysis on four genres: newspaper, M.Sc. thesis, novel, and poetry, revealed narrative newspapers were most suitable for automatically generated summarization. The other genres suffered from incoherence and information loss. Overall, summaries for digital collections are suitable when used with newspaper documents and unsuitable for other genres. / xiii, 142 leaves ; 28 cm.

The purpose of dissertation is to utilize connotative messages for enhancing image retrieval and browsing. By adopting semiotics as a theoretical tool, this study explores problems of image retrieval and proposes an image retrieval model. The semiotics approach conceptually demonstrates that: 1) a fundamental reason for the dissonance between retrieved images and user needs is representation of connotative messages, and 2) the image retrieval model which makes use of denotative index terms is able to facilitate users to browse connotatively related images effectively even when the users' needs are potentially expressed in the form of denotative query. Two experiments are performed for verifying the semiotic-based image retrieval model and evaluating the effectiveness of the model. As data sources, 5,199 records are collected from Artefacts Canada: Humanities by Canadian Heritage Information Network, and the candidate terms of connotation and denotation are extracted from Art & Architecture Thesaurus. The first experiment, by applying term association measures, verifies that the connotative messages of an image can be derived from denotative messages of the image. The second experiment reveals that the association thesaurus which is constructed based on the associations between connotation and denotation facilitates assigning connotative terms to image documents. In addition, the result of relevant judgments presents that the association thesaurus improves the relative recall of retrieved image documents as well as the relative recall of browsing sets. This study concludes that the association thesaurus indicating associations between connotation and denotation is able to improve the accessibility of the connotative messages. The results of the study are hoped to contribute to the conceptual knowledge of image retrieval by providing understandings of connotative messages within an image and to the practical design of image retrieval system by proposing an association thesaurus which can supplement the limitations of the current content-based image retrieval systems (CBIR).

M.Bibl. (Information Studies) / Traditionally it is part of the library or information service to provide clients with access to current and relevant information through current awareness services. It is part of the information professional's task to apply new technology and necessary services to the advantage of the clients. The purpose of this study was to establish, by means of empirical research, the effectiveness of CoMIC - an abstracting journal service currently provided to the mining industry. Other institutions providing a similar abstracting journal service should be able to use this methodology as a basis when evaluating their own service. Both a literature survey (to gain basic information about current awareness services in general and more specifically abstracting journals) and a postal questionnaire (to establish clients' opinions about the CoMIC service) were used during the study. From the literature survey it was established that the use of an effective current awareness service holds a variety of advantages. There are however also a few problems associated with the provision of current awareness services. These problems are surpassable providing the necessary precautions are taken in time. The criteria to which abstracting journals are to adhere were established. The purpose of the questionnaire was to give clients the oportunity to express their personal views with regard to the CoMIC service. The most important information extrapolated from the questionnaire was that respondents were satisfied with most aspects of the service. Recommendations with regard to alleviating a few minor problems were provided. After an analysis of the research results, it was concluded that CoMIC should be classified as an effective abstracting journal service.

Text summarization is the task of generating a shortened version of the original text where core ideas of the original text are retained. In this work, we focus on query focused summarization. The task is to generate the summary from a set of documents which answers the query. Query focused summarization is a hard task because it expects the summary to be biased towards the query and at the same time important concepts in the original documents must be preserved with high degree of novelty. Graph based ranking algorithms which use biased random surfer model like Topic-sensitive LexRank have been applied to query focused summarization. In our work, we propose look-ahead version of Topic-sensitive LexRank. We incorporate the option of look-ahead in the random walk model and we show that it helps in generating better quality summaries. Next, we consider assessment of machine translation. Assessment of a machine translation output is important for establishing benchmarks for translation quality. An obvious way to assess the quality of machine translation is through the perception of human subjects. Though highly reliable, this approach is not scalable and is time consuming. Hence mechanisms have been devised to automate the assessment process. All such assessment methods are essentially a study of correlations between human translation and the machine translation. In this work, we present a scalable approach to assess the quality of machine translation that borrows features from the study of writing styles, popularly known as Stylometry. Towards this, we quantify the characteristic styles of individual machine translators and compare them with that of human generated text. The translator whose style is closest to human style is deemed to generate a higher quality translation. We show that our approach is scalable and does not require actual source text translations for evaluation.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Surveillance videos are recorded continually and the retrieval of such videos currently still relies on human operators. Automatic retrieval has not reached a satisfactory accuracy. As an intermediate representation, this work develops multiple original temporal profiles of video to convey accurate temporal information in the video while keeping certain spatial characteristics. These are effective methods to visualizes surveillance video contents efficiently in a 2D temporal image, suitable for indexing and retrieving a large video database. We are aiming to provide a compact index that is intuitive and preserves most of the information in the video in order to avoid browsing extensive video clips frame by frame. By considering some of the properties of static surveillance videos, we aim at accentuating the temporal dimension in our visualization. We have introduced our framework as three unique methods that visualize different aspects of a surveillance video, plus an extension to non-static surveillance videos. In our first method "Localized Temporal Profile", by knowing that most surveillance videos are monitoring specific locations, we try to emphasize the other dimension, time, in our solution. we focus on describing all the events only in critical locations of the video. In our next method "Multi-Position Temporal Profile", we generate an all-inclusive profile that covers all the events in the video field of view. In our last method "Motion Temporal Profile" we perform in-depth analysis of scene motion and try to handle targets with non-uniform, non-translational motion in our temporal profile. We then further extend our framework by loosening the constraint that the video is static and including cameras with smooth panning motion as such videos are widely used in practice. By performing motion analysis on the camera, we stabilize the camera to create a panorama-like effect for the video, allowing us to utilize all of the aforementioned methods. The resulting profiles allows temporal indexing to each video frame, and contains all spatial information in a continuous manner. It also shows the actions and progress of events in the temporal profile. Flexible browsing and effective manipulation of videos can be achieved using the resulting video profiles.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l’Université de Montréal / While content selection has been intensively explored in the sentence extraction approach to automatic swnmarization, there is generally little work on the other process of content condensation. To understand this process of condensation, we propose a partial typology based on whether a linguistic unit is replaced, deleted, compressed into fewer essential units, or combined with another unit. Four important categories of condensation processes: generalization, deletion, compression, and aggregation, including their inverse processes, e.g. insertion, and expansion, which were occasionally observed, are proposed. To guide the usage of the same tenu for similar operations, we borrow definitions from linguistics. The type and function of the linguistic units involved are also discussed. We carried out an empirical analysis of 57 author-written abstracts of on-line journal articles in entomology, tracing each abstract sentence back to the plausible source sentences in the corresponding full text. Unlike other studies which focus on the resultant abstract, our study focuses on the processes leading to the production of abstract sentences from corresponding full-text sentences. We do not, however, propose an algorithm for abstracting, or account for all the conditions under which individual condensation operations may apply. While a range of substitutes were used in abstracting, about half of the stems of lexical units in our abstracts share the same stem as their source words, or are their derived forms. Only a small proportion of substitutes were synonyms, and the rest were (quasi-)synonyms, or imprecise equivalents. Authors tend to use less technical forms in abstracts possibly in anticipation of non-specialist abstract readers. Numerical expressions are rendered less precise although no less accurate: absolute numbers and decimals are rounded off, and percentages replaced by ratios or fractions. These observations are consistent with the "new" context of an abstract where only the gist of a document s content need be re-conveyed. Among the linguistic units commonly deleted are metadiscourse phrases, and segments of text (e.g. parenthetical texts, and apposed texts), which provide details and precision in the full text, but are out of place in an abstract. Redundancies inserted for various reasons, or units deemed to be implicit to the comprehension of targeted readers are also often removed. While deletion is an important sub-process of condensation, we observed some instances of adding experimental and other details to compact more information into abstract. The expansion or "unpacking" of compact linguistic units was also observed. The secondary role of inverse processes observed calls for a review of the meaning of condensation from "not giving as much detail or using fewer words" to include the adding of information in order to make a unit of text informatively compact. Among the linguistic units compressed are verbal complexes containing a support verb, or a catenative. Like semantically empty support verbs (e.g. X caused decreases in Y = X reduced Y), some catenatives too may be deleted without significant changes in meaning to the verbal complex (e.g. X was allowed to hatch E-e X hatched). Redundancy in meaning between an adjective and a noun in a noun phrase, e.g. functional role, may be removed, and the phrase compressed to just the stem of the adjective, i.e. function. While not frequently occurring in the corpus studied, the compression of such units may be described by rules, and hence, might be operationalized for automatic abstracting. Aggregation, the combining of units of text within or between sentences, is an important sub-process of condensation. Two-thirds of sentences in abstracts studied were written using multiple sentences, and more sentences were combined without than with the use of an explicit sign, such as a connective, a colon or a semi-colon. If research in summarization is to progress beyond sentence selection, then we must work towards: (a) a clear distinction between operations that are condensation processes, and those that are not; (b) bringing operationally similar processes together under the same designation, and (c) a greater understanding of sub-processes constitutiiig condensation. To this end, our provisional typology for condensation, the range of type of linguistic units involved and their functions sets the first step to advance research into content condensation. We have only just begun to identify the condensation sub-processes in operation during abstracting. The factors that are critical on the interplay of these processes still need to be investigated.

Abstract not available

Thesis--University of Pittsburgh. / Cover title: Vocabulary control in L.C. classification. Bibliography: p. 147-55.