This thesis is a pilot study aimed at exploring how a chatbot can be designed to be used as a tool to give elderly classical music concert subscribers information about concerts they are attending. Previous works have indicated chatbots to be useful as information retrieval systems. To test this theory, a chatbot called “BerwaldBoten” was created and tested on eight elderly concert subscribers. Apart from testing the chatbot in everyday settings during a week leading up to a concert, the users also answered questionnaires before and after the study for qualitative data. Data from the chats was also collected for qualitative analysis. The results were generally positive, where most users found it easier to acquire concert information when using the chatbot. A need to provide the alternatives to interact using either quick reply buttons or free text was indicated. Furthermore, the importance of stating limitations and being transparent regarding the system state at all times is discussed. / Detta examensarbete är en pilotstudie med målet att utforska hur en chatbot kan designas för att användas av äldre konsertabonnenter av klassisk musik för att ge dem information om konserter. Tidigare forskning har visat på att chatbotar är användbara som informationshämtningsystem. För att testa denna teori skapades chatboten “BerwaldBoten” och testades på åtta äldre konsertabonnenter. Utöver att testa chatboten i vardagliga situationer under en vecka före en konsert fick användarna svara på frågeformulär före och efter studien för kvalitativ data. Data från chatkonversationerna samlades också in för kvalitativ analys. Resultaten var i överlag positiva, och en majoritet av användarna tyckte att det var enklare att erhålla information när de använde chatboten. Ett behov av att tillhandahålla alternativen att interagera antingen genom snabbsvarsknappar (quick reply buttons) eller fritext indikerades. Vidare diskuterades vikten av att förklara begränsningar och att alltid vara transparent om systemtillståndet.

In this research the relationships between user information satisfaction (UIS) and user productivity were examined. Two users groups were used to test the following hypotheses: H₁_A: There is no relationship between UIS and perceptions of decision-making quality for academic department heads. H₁_B: There is no relationship between UIS and perceptions of decision-making quality for managers within the controller’s office. H₂: There is no relationship between UIS and objectively measured productivity for managers within the controller’s office. H₃: There is no relationship between UIS and a user’s length of experience with a system. H₄_A: There is no relationship between UIS and a user’s age. H₄_B: There is no relationship between UIS and a user’s sex. H₄_C: There is no relationship between UIS and a user’s level of education. Data utilized in testing the hypotheses were collected with a packet of six questionnaires mailed to the controllers of 100 universities. Usable responses were obtained from 107 of 300 controller’s office managers and 77 of 300 academic users. H₁_A, H₁_B and H₂ were tested with canonical correlation analysis. H₃, H₄_A, H₄_B and H₄_C were tested with multiple regression. The findings can be summarized as follows: 1. Satisfaction with computer processing was correlated with making better operating budget decisions for both groups and helping academic users track activities in research, grant and designated gift accounts. 2. Satisfaction with system related problem finding was correlated with elimination of steps and making jobs easier for managers, and with helping academic users track activity in research accounts, and to feel they have benefited overall from FRS. 3. Satisfaction with the linear combination of inputs and problem finding was correlated with financial transactions per full time employee equivalents (FTE), late internal reports per total internal reports and number of ledger accounts per FTE. 4. More frequent users of FRS were more satisfied. Additionally, UIS and mandatory system usage were positively correlated. 5. UIS and sex were moderately correlated. Specifically, males within the academic group were less satisfied with FRS than the females surveyed. / Ph. D.

Text has been the historical way of preserving and acquiring knowledge, and text data today is an increasingly growing part of the digital footprint together with the need to query this data for information. Seeking information is a constant ongoing process, and is a crucial part of many systems all around us. The ability to perform fast and effective searches is a must when dealing with vast amounts of data. This thesis implements an information retrieval system based on the Swedish Defence Force's profession guide, with the aim to produce a system that retrieves relevant professions based on user defined queries of varying size. A number of Natural Language Processing techniques are investigated and implemented, in order to transform the gathered profession descriptions a document embedding model, doc2vec, was implemented resulting in document vectors that are compared to find similarities between documents. The final system was evaluated by domain experts, represented by active military personal that quantified the relevancy of the profession retrievals into a measurable performance. The system managed to retrieve relevant information for 46.6% and 56.6% of the long- and short text inputs respectively. Resulting in a much more generalized and capable system compared to the search function available at the profession guide today.

In a traditional relational database management system, queries can only be defined over attributes defined in the schema, but are guaranteed to give single, definitive answer structured exactly as specified in the query. In contrast, an information retrieval system allows the user to pose queries without knowledge of a schema, but the result will be a top-k list of possible answers, with no guarantees about the structure or content of the retrieved documents. In this chapter, we present Drill Beyond, a novel IR/RDBMS hybrid system, in which the user seamlessly queries a relational database together with a large corpus of tables extracted from a web crawl. The system allows full SQL queries over a relational database, but additionally enables the user to use arbitrary additional attributes in the query that need not to be defined in the schema. The system then processes this semi-specified query by computing a top-k list of possible query evaluations, each based on different candidate web data sources, thus mixing properties of two worlds RDBMS and IR systems.

L'objectif de cette thèse, menée dans un cadre industriel, est d'apparier des contenus textuels médiatiques. Plus précisément, il s'agit d'apparier à des articles de presse en ligne des vidéos pertinentes, pour lesquelles nous disposons d'une description textuelle. Notre problématique relève donc exclusivement de l'analyse de matériaux textuels, et ne fait intervenir aucune analyse d'image ni de langue orale. Surviennent alors des questions relatives à la façon de comparer des objets textuels, ainsi qu'aux critères mobilisés pour estimer leur degré de similarité. L'un de ces éléments est selon nous la similarité thématique de leurs contenus, autrement dit le fait que deux documents doivent relater le même sujet pour former une paire pertinente. Ces problématiques relèvent du domaine de la recherche d'information (ri), dans lequel nous nous ancrons principalement. Par ailleurs, lorsque l'on traite des contenus d'actualité, la dimension temporelle est aussi primordiale et les problématiques qui l'entourent relèvent de travaux ayant trait au domaine du topic detection and tracking (tdt) dans lequel nous nous inscrivons également.Le système d'appariement développé dans cette thèse distingue donc différentes étapes qui se complètent. Dans un premier temps, l'indexation des contenus fait appel à des méthodes de traitement automatique des langues (tal) pour dépasser la représentation classique des textes en sac de mots. Ensuite, deux scores sont calculés pour rendre compte du degré de similarité entre deux contenus : l'un relatif à leur similarité thématique, basé sur un modèle vectoriel de ri; l'autre à leur proximité temporelle, basé sur une fonction empirique. Finalement, un modèle de classification appris à partir de paires de documents, décrites par ces deux scores et annotées manuellement, permet d'ordonnancer les résultats.L'évaluation des performances du système a elle aussi fait l'objet de questionnements dans ces travaux de thèse. Les contraintes imposées par les données traitées et le besoin particulier de l'entreprise partenaire nous ont en effet contraints à adopter une alternative au protocole classique d'évaluation en ri, le paradigme de Cranfield. / The goal of this thesis, conducted within an industrial framework, is to pair textual media content. Specifically, the aim is to pair on-line news articles to relevant videos for which we have a textual description. The main issue is then a matter of textual analysis, no image or spoken language analysis was undertaken in the present study. The question that arises is how to compare these particular objects, the texts, and also what criteria to use in order to estimate their degree of similarity. We consider that one of these criteria is the topic similarity of their content, in other words, the fact that two documents have to deal with the same topic to form a relevant pair. This problem fall within the field of information retrieval (ir) which is the main strategy called upon in this research. Furthermore, when dealing with news content, the time dimension is of prime importance. To address this aspect, the field of topic detection and tracking (tdt) will also be explored.The pairing system developed in this thesis distinguishes different steps which complement one another. In the first step, the system uses natural language processing (nlp) methods to index both articles and videos, in order to overcome the traditionnal bag-of-words representation of texts. In the second step, two scores are calculated for an article-video pair: the first one reflects their topical similarity and is based on a vector space model; the second one expresses their proximity in time, based on an empirical function. At the end of the algorithm, a classification model learned from manually annotated document pairs is used to rank the results.Evaluation of the system's performances raised some further questions in this doctoral research. The constraints imposed both by the data and the specific need of the partner company led us to adapt the evaluation protocol traditionnal used in ir, namely the cranfield paradigm. We therefore propose an alternative solution for evaluating the system that takes all our constraints into account.

Orientador: Ricardo da Silva Torres / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-13T11:00:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Penatti_OtavioAugustoBizetto_M.pdf: 2250748 bytes, checksum: 57d5b2f9120a8eae69ee9881d363e9ce (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009 / Resumo: A crescente quantidade de imagens geradas e disponibilizadas atualmente tem eito aumentar a necessidade de criação de sistemas de busca para este tipo de informação. Um método promissor para a realização da busca de imagens e a busca por conteúdo. Este tipo de abordagem considera o conteúdo visual das imagens, como cor, textura e forma de objetos, para indexação e recuperação. A busca de imagens por conteúdo tem como componente principal o descritor de imagens. O descritor de imagens é responsável por extrair propriedades visuais das imagens e armazená-las em vetores de características. Dados dois vetores de características, o descritor compara-os e retorna um valor de distancia. Este valor quantifica a diferença entre as imagens representadas pelos vetores. Em um sistema de busca de imagens por conteúdo, a distancia calculada pelo descritor de imagens é usada para ordenar as imagens da base em relação a uma determinada imagem de consulta. Esta dissertação realiza um estudo comparativo de descritores de imagens considerando a Web como cenário de uso. Este cenário apresenta uma quantidade muito grande de imagens e de conteúdo bastante heterogêneo. O estudo comparativo realizado nesta dissertação é feito em duas abordagens. A primeira delas considera a complexidade assinto tica dos algoritmos de extração de vetores de características e das funções de distancia dos descritores, os tamanhos dos vetores de características gerados pelos descritores e o ambiente no qual cada descritor foi validado originalmente. A segunda abordagem compara os descritores em experimentos práticos em quatro bases de imagens diferentes. Os descritores são avaliados segundo tempo de extração, tempo para cálculos de distancia, requisitos de armazenamento e eficácia. São comparados descritores de cor, textura e forma. Os experimentos são realizados com cada tipo de descritor independentemente e, baseado nestes resultados, um conjunto de descritores é avaliado em uma base com mais de 230 mil imagens heterogêneas, que reflete o conteúdo encontrado na Web. A avaliação de eficácia dos descritores na base de imagens heterogêneas é realizada por meio de experimentos com usuários reais. Esta dissertação também apresenta uma ferramenta para a realização automatizada de testes comparativos entre descritores de imagens. / Abstract: The growth in size of image collections and the worldwide availability of these collections has increased the demand for image retrieval systems. A promising approach to address this demand is to retrieve images based on image content (Content-Based Image Retrieval). This approach considers the image visual properties, like color, texture and shape of objects, for indexing and retrieval. The main component of a content-based image retrieval system is the image descriptor. The image descriptor is responsible for encoding image properties into feature vectors. Given two feature vectors, the descriptor compares them and computes a distance value. This value quantifies the difference between the images represented by their vectors. In a content-based image retrieval system, these distance values are used to rank database images with respect to their distance to a given query image. This dissertation presents a comparative study of image descriptors considering the Web as the environment of use. This environment presents a huge amount of images with heterogeneous content. The comparative study was conducted by taking into account two approaches. The first approach considers the asymptotic complexity of feature vectors extraction algorithms and distance functions, the size of the feature vectors generated by the descriptors and the environment where each descriptor was validated. The second approach compares the descriptors in practical experiments using four different image databases. The evaluation considers the time required for features extraction, the time for computing distance values, the storage requirements and the effectiveness of each descriptor. Color, texture, and shape descriptors were compared. The experiments were performed with each kind of descriptor independently and, based on these results, a set of descriptors was evaluated in an image database containing more than 230 thousand heterogeneous images, reflecting the content existent in the Web. The evaluation of descriptors effectiveness in the heterogeneous database was made by experiments using real users. This dissertation also presents a tool for executing experiments aiming to evaluate image descriptors. / Mestrado / Sistemas de Informação / Mestre em Ciência da Computação

Submitted by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2015-05-15T13:33:06Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - André Rodrigues Coimbra - 2014.pdf: 5214859 bytes, checksum: d951502129d7be5d60b6a785516c3ad1 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2015-05-15T13:37:45Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - André Rodrigues Coimbra - 2014.pdf: 5214859 bytes, checksum: d951502129d7be5d60b6a785516c3ad1 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-15T13:37:45Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - André Rodrigues Coimbra - 2014.pdf: 5214859 bytes, checksum: d951502129d7be5d60b6a785516c3ad1 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-03-28 / Ranking functions have a vital role in the performance of information retrieval systems ensuring that documents more related to the user’s search need – represented as a query – are shown in the top results, preventing the user from having to examine a range of documents that are not really relevant. Therefore, this work uses Genetic Programming (GP), an Evolutionary Computation technique, to find ranking functions automaticaly and systematicaly. Moreover, in this project the technique of GP was developed following a strategy that exploits parallelism through graphics processing units. Other known methods in the context of information retrieval as classification committees and the Lazy strategy were combined with the proposed approach – called Finch. These combinations were only feasible due to the GP nature and the use of parallelism. The experimental results with the Finch, regarding the ranking functions quality, surpassed the results of several strategies known in the literature. Considering the time performance, significant gains were also achieved. The solution developed exploiting the parallelism spends around twenty times less time than the solution using only the central processing unit. / Funções de ordenação têm um papel vital no desempenho de sistemas de recuperação de informação garantindo que os documentos mais relacionados com o desejo do usuário – representado através de uma consulta – sejam trazidos no topo dos resultados, evitando que o usuário tenha que analisar uma série de documentos que não sejam realmente relevantes. Assim, utiliza-se a Programação Genética (PG), uma técnica da Computação Evolucionária, para descobrir de forma automática e sistemática funções de ordenação. Além disso, neste trabalho a técnica de PG foi desenvolvida seguindo uma estratégia que explora o paralelismo através de unidades gráficas de processamento. Foram agregados ainda na abordagem proposta – denominada Finch – outros métodos conhecidos no contexto de recuperação de informação como os comitês de classificação e a estratégia Lazy. Sendo que essa complementação só foi viável devido a natureza da PG e em virtude da utilização do paralelismo. Os resultados experimentais encontrados com a Finch, em relação à qualidade das funções de ordenação descobertas, superaram os resultados de diversas estratégias conhecidas na literatura. Considerando o desempenho da abordagem em função do tempo, também foram alcançados ganhos significativos. A solução desenvolvida explorando o paralelismo gasta, em média, vinte vezes menos tempo que a solução utilizando somente a unidade central de processamento.

Science educators are currently facing the challenge of reforming the practices of science education. Publications of various science and educational organizations have established new criteria for accomplishing this goal. The new goal of science educators is scientific literacy for all.

Diese Diplomarbeit führt kurz in das Thema Information Retrieval mit den Schwerpunkten Evaluation und Evaluationskampagnen ein. Im Anschluss wird anhand der Nachteile eines vorhandenen Retrieval Systems ein neues Retrieval Framework zur experimentellen Evaluation von Ansätzen aus dem Information Retrieval entworfen und umgesetzt. Die Komponenten des Frameworks sind dabei so abstrakt angelegt, dass verschiedene, bestehende Retrieval Systeme, wie zum Beispiel Apache Lucene oder Terrier, integriert werden können. Anhand einer Referenzimplementierung für den ImageCLEF Photographic Retrieval Task des ImageCLEF Tracks des Cross Language Evaluation Forums wird die Funktionsfähigkeit des Frameworks überprüft und bestätigt.

Submitted by Elba Lopes (elba.lopes@fecap.br) on 2017-04-04T21:36:02Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Paulo Rog??rio Gomes Gon??alves.pdf: 5642577 bytes, checksum: deb01b20b62885c60e71197343469d33 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-04-04T21:36:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Paulo Rog??rio Gomes Gon??alves.pdf: 5642577 bytes, checksum: deb01b20b62885c60e71197343469d33 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-03-17 / This study sought to investigate how the strategic positioning of Accounting Organizations with the implementation of the Public Digital Bookkeeping System - SPED. For this carried out a quantitative classification, descriptive and survey, in which a questionnaire was applied to obtain the data. The results showed that 83.30% of survey participants accounting organizations opted for the generic strategy of "differentiation" (PORTER, 2004), that is, they positioned themselves in order to provide services with higher quality and invest in their organizational structures, seeking to offer superior benefits those of competitors. / Este trabalho procurou investigar qual o posicionamento estrat??gico das organiza????es cont??beis com a implanta????o do Sistema P??blico de Escritura????o Digital - SPED. Para isso realizou-se uma pesquisa de classifica????o quantitativa, descritiva e de levantamento (survey), no qual foi aplicado um question??rio para a obten????o dos dados. Os resultados demonstraram que 83,30% das organiza????es cont??beis participantes da pesquisa optaram pela estrat??gia gen??rica de "Diferencia????o" (PORTER, 2004), ou seja, se posicionaram visando prestar servi??os com maior qualidade e investir nas suas estruturas organizacionais, procurando oferecer benef??cios superiores aos dos concorrentes.