Longform spoken dialog is a rich source of information that is present in all facets of everyday life, taking the form of podcasts, debates, and interviews; these mediums contain important topics ranging from healthcare and diversity to current events, economics and politics. Individuals need to digest informative content to know how to vote, decide how to stay safe from COVID-19, and how to increase diversity in the workplace. Unfortunately compared to text, spoken dialog can be challenging to consume as it is slower than reading and difficult to skim or navigate. Although an individual may be interested in a given topic, they may be unwilling to commit the required time necessary to consume long form auditory media given the uncertainty as to whether such content will live up to their expectations. Clearly, there exists a need to provide access to the information spoken dialog provides in a manner through which individuals can quickly and intuitively access areas of interest without investing large amounts of time. From Human Computer Interaction, we apply the idea of information foraging, which theorizes how people browse and navigate to satisfy an information need, to the longform spoken dialog domain. Information foraging states that people do not browse linearly. Rather people “forage” for information similar to how animals sniff around for food, scanning from area to area, constantly deciding whether to keep investigating their current area or to move on to greener pastures. This is an instance of the classic breadth vs. depth dilemma. People rely on perceived structure and information cues to make these decisions. Unfortunately speech, either spoken or transcribed, is unstructured and lacks information cues, making it difficult for users to browse and navigate. We create a longform spoken dialog browsing system that utilizes automatic summarization and speech modeling to structure longform dialog to present information in a manner that is both intuitive and flexible towards different user browsing needs. Leveraging summarization models to automatically and hierarchically structure spoken dialog, the system is able to distill information into increasingly salient and abstract summaries, allowing for a tiered representation that, if interested, users can progressively explore. Additionally, we address spoken dialog’s own set of technical challenges to speech modeling that are not present in written text, such as disfluencies, improper punctuation, lack of annotated speech data, and inherent lack of structure. We create a longform spoken dialog browsing system that utilizes automatic summarization and speech modeling to structure longform dialog to present information in a manner that is both intuitive and flexible towards different user browsing needs. Leveraging summarization models to automatically and hierarchically structure spoken dialog, the system is able to distill information into increasingly salient and abstract summaries, allowing for a tiered representation that, if interested, users can progressively explore. Additionally, we address spoken dialog’s own set of technical challenges to speech modeling that are not present in written text, such as disfluencies, improper punctuation, lack of annotated speech data, and inherent lack of structure. Since summarization is a lossy compression of information, the system provides users with information cues to signal how much additional information is contained on a topic. This thesis makes the following contributions: 1. We applied the HCI concept of information foraging to longform speech, enabling people to browse and navigate information in podcasts, interviews, panels, and meetings. 2. We created a system that structures longform dialog into hierarchical summaries which help users to 1) skim (browse) audio and 2) navigate and drill down into interesting sections to read full details. 3. We created a human annotated hierarchical dataset to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of our system’s hierarchical text generation performance. 4. Lastly, we developed a suite of dialog oriented processing optimizations to improve the user experience of summaries: enhanced readability and fluency of short summaries through better topic chunking and pronoun imputation, and reliable indication of semantic coverage within short summaries to help direct navigation towards interesting information. We discuss future research in extending the browsing and navigating system to more challenging domains such as lectures, which contain many external references, or workplace conversations, which contain uncontextualized background information and are far less structured than podcasts and interviews.

No description available.

Current Web image search engines, such as Google or Bing Images, adopt a hybrid search approach in which a text-based query (e.g. "apple") is used to retrieve a set of relevant images, which are then refined by the user (e.g. by re-ranking the retrieved images based on similarity to a selected example). This approach makes it possible to use both text information (e.g. the initial query) and image features (e.g. as part of the refinement stage) to identify images which are relevant to the user. One limitation of these current systems is that text and image features are treated as independent components and are often used in a decoupled manner. This work proposes to develop an integrated hybrid search method which leverages the synergies between text and image features. Recently, there has been tremendous progress in the computer vision community in learning models of visual concepts from collections of example images. While impressive performance has been achieved on standardized data sets, scaling these methods so that they are capable of working at web scale remains a significant challenge. This work will develop approaches to visual modeling that can be scaled to address the task of retrieving billions of images on the Web. Specifically, we propose to address two research issues related to integrated text- and image-based retrieval. First, we will explore whether models of visual concepts which are learned from collections of web images can be utilized to improve the image ranking associated with a text-based query. Second, we will investigate the hypothesis that the click-patterns associated with standard web image search engines can be utilized to learn query-specific image similarity measures that support improved query-refinement performance. We will evaluate our research by constructing a prototype integrated hybrid retrieval system based on the data from 300K real-world image queries. We will conduct user-studies to evaluate the effectiveness of our learned similarity measures and quantify the benefit of our method in real world search tasks such as target search.

Described as accommodating both traditional and new information spaces (Fourie 2002: 53), the Web has significantly changed the milieu of research and study. The study determined how this changing research and study environment has affected the research behaviour of students in African higher education environments, specifically at the research entry level of master's degree programmes. The study examined both explicit examples of the affect of the Web on students' citation behaviour and tacit influences that may have determined the extent of this affect. Explicit examples of the affect of the Web were drawn from analysing changes in the citation patterns of Master of Information Studies (MIS) theses during a period of access to the Web, and specifically in the years 1996, 1999 and 2002. Tacit influences on students' citation behaviour were inferred from an investigation of the level and nature of MIS supervisors' use and support of the Web for research and of a background study of the facilities, resources and services supporting student access to the Web at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. Findings of this study concluded that the use of the Web medium has grown and in 2002 accounted for 17.5% of all citations included in MIS bibliographies. However use of this medium is disparate with a few bibliographies accounting for much of this growth. Findings indicated that the Web medium was mostly utilised for the delivery of sources that do not meet the traditional description of a scholarly source. The study also found that the Web was used as an alternative medium for the delivery of informal and grey literature sources without necessarily increasing the level of use of these sources. The study revealed greater support for this medium from the masters programme's supervisors than was evidenced from a citation analysis of the bibliographies of theses. Disparities in the support of this medium for research, within the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg's supporting infrastructure was also observed. Recommendations drawn from these conclusions include the need for greater intervention from teaching faculty, librarians and the institution in the provision of clear guidelines of expectations, relevant instruction and sufficient physical access at points of expertise, to effectively support the use of Web resources. / Thesis (M.I.S.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.

This research was a case study that investigated predictors of users’ preferences for digital information at the Oceanographic Research Institute (ORI) Library in Durban, South Africa. The objectives of the study were to determine the predictors of users’ preferences for digital information, examine user attitude towards use of digital information, evaluate user competencies in the use of digital information, examine available ICT infrastructure to facilitate access to digital information and assess usage patterns of electronic resources. Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was used to underpin the study, using the mixed method paradigm consisting of qualitative and quantitative methods. A census of the study population, consisting of 26 respondents, was taken. Data was collected using focus group discussions, semi-structured interviews, participant observations, document reviews and survey questionnaires. Quantitative data was analysed using descriptive statistics, while qualitative data was analysed thematically. The findings of the study indicated that there was increasing preference of digital information to print by scholars. Moreover, usage of digital information was high by virtue of being easy to use and useful for scholarly work. The findings revealed that scholars had developed a positive attitude towards digital information. In addition, user experience with computers and the availability of infrastructure within the organisation were found to be facilitating conditions for digital information usage behaviour. The findings showed that respondents lacked relevant skills for the effective use of digital information and the ORI Library lacked adequate computers and electronic resources to satisfy user needs. The study recommended the development of a digital repository, user training to improve use of digital information resources. Suggested areas for research included examining the use of electronic resources in marine and aquatic institutions in Africa to establish grounds for collaborations and resource sharing. A study to assess the quality of research output by scholars was also recommended, as a way of exposing the critical or non-critical use of digital sources. / Thesis (M.I.S.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Computer Science Department, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (D. Ed. Min.)--Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 328-336).

Thesis (D. Ed. Min.)--Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 328-336).

This dissertation reports on an action research project that guided the development of the Goudmyn (www.onnet.up.ac.za), a web-based information resource for Afrikaans language teachers. The information needs and utilisation of information resources by 78 Afrikaans First Language teachers were determined by means of a questionnaire and focus group discussions. The quality of the Goudmyn as information resource for and Afrikaans teachers' utilisation thereof were formally assessed. From the data it is evident that Afrikaans language teachers do not utilise the Internet as an information resource to a high degree. Nevertheless, statistics of visits to the Goudmyn indicate that the resource is being utilised increasingly. Reasons for low levels of Internet utilisation by the respondents include the following: a lack of Internet access, time, training, relevant information, awareness of resources and integration of ICT skills into the curriculum. The study found that a web site such as the Goudmyn has the potential to play a central role in supporting Afrikaans language teachers, if the teachers are trained and made aware of the use and applications of the Internet for teaching purposes. / Thesis (MA (Information Science))--University of Pretoria, 2004. / Information Science / unrestricted