Includes bibliography. / The Institute for Medical Literature (IML) provides an online bibliographic service to the biomedical community in South Africa. The requirements of the users of the services of IML were evaluated in respect of needs and satisfaction of these needs. A non-user population was also identified and evaluated. The research study was undertaken by (a) conducting a review of the literature; and (b) conducting an empirical study of users and non-users of IML to construct both a "personal" and "information behaviour" profile of both the user and non-user groups. The literature was studied to provide (i) a conceptual framework for the field of research, (ii) a compilation of findings in studies related to this study and (iii) a basis for the selection of the methodology employed in the study. The "personal" profile comprised details of age, rank and work activity type and the "information behaviour" profile comprised details of use of information channels. The needs of the users, as measured by various criteria for satisfaction of these needs, were also measured. The reasons for the non-use of the service were also investigated. The principal conclusions reached were: (a) The expressed information need of the users of IML were satisfied; (b) the majority of non-users had not heard of IML; (c) there was a difference between the information seeking behaviour of users and non-users of IML; and (d) age, rank and work activity type influenced the use or non-use of IML.

This research investigated issues related to normalizing punctuation marks from a text retrieval perspective. A punctuated-centric approach was undertaken by exploring changes in meanings, whitespaces, words retrievability, and other issues related to normalizing punctuation marks. To investigate punctuation normalization issues, various frequency counts of punctuation marks and punctuation patterns were conducted using the text drawn from the Gutenberg Project archive and the Usenet Newsgroup archive. A number of useful punctuation mark types that could aid in analyzing punctuation marks were discovered. This study identified two types of punctuation normalization procedures: (1) lexical independent (LI) punctuation normalization and (2) lexical oriented (LO) punctuation normalization. Using these two types of punctuation normalization procedures, this study discovered various effects of punctuation normalization in terms of different search query types. By analyzing the punctuation normalization problem in this manner, a wide range of issues were discovered such as: the need to define different types of searching, to disambiguate the role of punctuation marks, to normalize whitespaces, and indexing of punctuated terms. This study concluded that to achieve the most positive effect in a text retrieval environment, normalizing punctuation marks should be based on an extensive systematic analysis of punctuation marks and punctuation patterns and their related factors. The results of this study indicate that there were many challenges due to complexity of language. Further, this study recommends avoiding a simplistic approach to punctuation normalization.

The test effect (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006) demonstrates that performance on a final test is better when an immediate test is taken after reading a passage rather than rereading. Although transfer appropriate processing has been suggested as a theoretical explanation, the results could be due to elaborative retrieval processes during the immediate test that are not available during restudy. We compared testing to three other strategies using elaborative retrieval—Generating Questions, Read-Recite-Review, Teaching—to determine whether they would be as beneficial as testing. Results showed that each of the alternative strategies produced final test performance equal to that of testing, suggesting not only that these strategies are as effective as testing, but also that elaborative retrieval can explain test effects. However, final test performance for testing was not better than rereading. This finding leaves unanswered questions, given that the test effect is a robust result in the literature.

Children with ADHD exhibit impairments in memory retrieval processes that are required for successful performance in a wide range of activities including social/interpersonal interactions, as well as academic success. There have been few attempts of explaining the relationship between these memory retrieval deficits in children with ADHD and specific executive functions such as working memory. The current study addresses the possible mediating effects of the subsystems of working memory (phonological short-term memory, visual-spatial short-term memory, and the central executive) on memory retrieval. Children ages 8-12 with ADHD and typically developing children completed a counterbalanced series of working memory tasks that were specific to the subsystems (phonological and visual-spatial). The Central Executive portion of working memory was obtained using a regression approach of these measures. The children also completed the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement (KTEA-II), as the associational fluency task was used as the memory retrieval measure for this investigation.

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Yes / This study examined the effects of providing cues to facilitate autobiographical memory retrieval in Parkinson's disease. Previous findings have shown that individuals with Parkinson's disease retrieve fewer specific autobiographical memories than older adult controls. These findings are clinically significant since the quality of autobiographical memory is linked to identity and sense of self. In the current study, 16 older adults with Parkinson's disease without dementia and 16 matched older adult controls were given 3 min in which to recall autobiographical memories associated with five different time periods and to give each memory a short title. Participants were later asked to retrieve the memories in three phases: firstly in a free recall phase; secondly in response to general cues (time periods) and finally in response to specific cues (the short titles previously given). The number of memories and the quality of the memory (general or specific) was recorded in each condition. Compared with matched older adult controls, the Parkinson's disease group was impaired in retrieving the memories that they had previously given in the free recall phase and in response to general cues. The performance of the group with Parkinson's disease was only equivalent to the older adults when they retrieved memories in response to self-generated cues. The findings are discussed in relation to theories of autobiographical memory and the neuropsychology of Parkinson's disease.

published_or_final_version / Computer Science and Information Systems / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

In this thesis we investigate two main problems: 1) inferring consensus from disparate inputs to improve quality of crowd contributed data; and 2) developing a reliable crowd-aided IR evaluation framework. With regard to the first contribution, while many statistical label aggregation methods have been proposed, little comparative benchmarking has occurred in the community making it difficult to determine the state-of-the-art in consensus or to quantify novelty and progress, leaving modern systems to adopt simple control strategies. To aid the progress of statistical consensus and make state-of-the-art methods accessible, we develop a benchmarking framework in SQUARE, an open source shared task framework including benchmark datasets, defined tasks, standard metrics, and reference implementations with empirical results for several popular methods. Through the development of SQUARE we propose a crowd simulation model that emulates real crowd environments to enable rapid and reliable experimentation of collaborative methods with different crowd contributions. We apply the findings of the benchmark to develop reliable crowd contributed test collections for IR evaluation. As our second contribution, we describe a collaborative model for distributing relevance judging tasks between trusted assessors and crowd judges. Based on prior work's hypothesis of judging disagreements on borderline documents, we train a logistic regression model to predict assessor disagreement, prioritizing judging tasks by expected disagreement. Judgments are generated from different crowd models and intelligently aggregated. Given a priority queue, a judging budget, and a ratio for expert vs. crowd judging costs, critical judging tasks are assigned to trusted assessors with the crowd supplying remaining judgments. Results on two TREC datasets show significant judging burden can be confidently shifted to the crowd, achieving high rank correlation and often at lower cost vs. exclusive use of trusted assessors. / text

Reviews why it is important to search blogs for competitive intelligence, reputation management, and brand image management. Describes the structure of blogs and how to format searches in several search engines to effectively retrieve this information.