Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-16T15:23:33Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 4229373 bytes, checksum: 0087285c704b68c550008eeb3ca7869a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-02-21 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / It investigates the understanding that resident doctors have about the process of information retrieval on the basis of Public Medical (PubMed) data, taking into consideration the aspects of usability in human-computer interaction, the resources available and the level of user satisfaction in searching process. The theoretical framework used for this research relates the concepts of information and information systems for the healthcare, and then addresses the Information Retrieval systems and databases, entering the field of information architecture for evaluating the usability of these sources information. The methodological approach includes exploratory research whose first phase consisted of the heuristic evaluation of the PubMed database interface, using the guidelines proposed by Nielsen and Tahir (2002). The results of this analysis show that although these guidelines have been designed to build homepage, thirty-eight of them are suited to the PubMed interface. Therefore, it is inferred that these guidelines can be used for heuristic evaluation of databases focused on the area of Health regarding the usability of this database, it was observed that the interface has a well-structured architecture, is friendly and objective, and present numerous possibilities for search and retrieval of information. The second phase of empirical study took place through the application of prospective usability testing to measure user satisfaction database. These tests were done using a semi-structured questionnaire administered to resident doctors specialty of Internal Medicine, University Hospital Walter Cantídio the Federal University of Ceará, totaling 36% of participants. The results of this step show a good performance and a good user satisfaction PubMed regarding the usability of the database, considering that enables them to achieve their research goals with real effectiveness and efficiency, yet they do not know all the resources available to search and retrieval of information offered by this database. / Investiga qual o entendimento que os médicos residentes têm sobre o processo de recuperação de informação na base de dados Public Medical (PubMed), levando em consideração os aspectos relativos à usabilidade na interação humano-computador, os recursos disponíveis e o nível de satisfação do usuário no processo de busca. O referencial teórico utilizado para esta pesquisa relaciona os conceitos de informação e de informação para a área da saúde, e em seguida aborda os Sistemas de Recuperação de Informação e as bases de dados, adentrando no campo da arquitetura da informação para avaliar a usabilidade dessas fontes de informação. O percurso metodológico contempla a pesquisa exploratória cuja primeira etapa constou da avaliação heurística da interface da base de dados PubMed, utilizando-se as diretrizes propostas por Nielsen e Tahir (2002). Os resultados dessa análise evidenciam que, embora tais diretrizes tenham sido pensadas para a construção de homepage, trinta e oito delas se adequaram à interface da PubMed. Portanto, infere-se que essas diretrizes podem ser utilizadas para a avaliação heurística de bases de dados voltadas para a área da Saúde. Com relação à usabilidade dessa base de dados, evidenciou-se que a interface tem uma arquitetura bem estruturada, é amigável e objetiva, além de apresentar inúmeras possibilidades de busca e recuperação da informação. A segunda etapa do estudo empírico deu-se por meio da aplicação dos testes prospectivos de usabilidade para mensurar a satisfação dos usuários da base de dados. Esses testes foram feitos por meio de um questionário semiestruturado aplicado aos médicos residentes da especialidade de Clínica Médica do Hospital Universitário Walter Cantídio da Universidade Federal do Ceará, perfazendo um total de 36% de participantes. Os resultados dessa etapa evidenciam um bom desempenho e uma boa satisfação dos usuários da PubMed quanto à usabilidade dessa base de dados, haja vista que permite a eles atingirem seus objetivos de pesquisa com real eficácia e eficiência, ainda que não conheçam todos os recursos disponíveis para a busca e a recuperação da informação oferecidos por essa base de dados.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-10-19T11:50:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 TatianaMest2011.pdf: 1824675 bytes, checksum: d16d13170b99f1d20e15f3dbd7f22446 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-03-30 / The great volume of data and the complexity of its treatment regarding information retrieval indicate the relevance of studies on search tools. The objective of the present work is to analyse the FINEP Controlled Vocabulary (VCF) as an instrument of organization and as a representation of information originated from research proposals submitted and approved to be financed by FINEP in the fields of science, technology and innovation in the country. FINEP, concerning study areas, is described as an important system of information retrieval. The VCF analysis are based on a historical and methodological approach on the vocabulary construction, pointing out aspects of its conception and improvements over time. The work investigates the feasibility of applying classification methods for descriptors in use, aiming to contribute to the present vocabulary. Results indicate advantages of applying categorization methods on the controlled vocabulary, and emphasize the fundamental role played by the descriptor s definition as an effective element to the whole process / O volume de informação e a complexidade do tratamento para recuperação da informação indicam a importância de estudos sobre instrumentos de busca. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo analisar o Vocabulário Controlado FINEP (VCF) enquanto instrumento de organização e representação da informação de uma empresa com acervo relevante de informações sobre o financiamento de propostas de pesquisa em ciência, tecnologia e inovação no país. Apresenta a empresa FINEP, como ambiente de estudo, no contexto dos Sistemas de Recuperação da Informação. A análise do VCF é feita por abordagem histórico metodológica da construção do vocabulário, ressaltando aspectos da concepção e das etapas de desenvolvimento do instrumento, destacando as principais mudanças no tempo. Investiga a viabilidade de aplicação do processo de categorização dos descritores em uso, como contribuição para a fase atual de reavaliação e reestruturação do vocabulário. Aponta para a viabilidade de aplicação do método de categorização no VCF, destacando a importância fundamental da definição dos descritores como elemento de análise para o processo de categorização

No description available.

Research in information retrieval deals with the theories and models that constitute the foundations for any kind of service that provides access or pointers to particular elements of a collection of documents in response to a submitted information need. The specific field of information retrieval evaluation is concerned with the critical assessment of the quality of search systems. Empirical evaluation based on the Cranfield paradigm using a specific collection of test queries in combination with relevance assessments in a laboratory environment is the classic approach to compare the impact of retrieval systems and their underlying models on retrieval effectiveness. In the past two decades international campaigns, like the Text Retrieval Conference, have led to huge advances in the design of experimental information retrieval evaluations. But in general the focus of this system-driven paradigm remained on the comparison of system results, i.e. retrieval systems are treated as black boxes. This approach to the evaluation of retrieval system has been criticised for treating systems as black boxes. Recent works on this subject have proposed the study of the system configurations and their individual components. This thesis proposes a generic approach to the evaluation of retrieval systems at the component-level. The focus of the thesis at hand is on the key components that are needed to address typical ad-hoc search tasks, like finding books on a particular topic in a large set of library records. A central approach in this work is the further development of the Xtrieval framework by the integration of widely-used IR toolkits in order to eliminate the limitations of individual tools. Strong empirical results at international campaigns that provided various types of evaluation tasks confirm both the validity of this approach and the flexibility of the Xtrieval framework. Modern information retrieval systems contain various components that are important for solving particular subtasks of the retrieval process. This thesis illustrates the detailed analysis of important system components needed to address ad-hoc retrieval tasks. Here, the design and implementation of the Xtrieval framework offers a variety of approaches for flexible system configurations. Xtrieval has been designed as an open system and allows the integration of further components and tools as well as addressing search tasks other than ad-hoc retrieval. This approach ensures that it is possible to conduct automated component-level evaluation of retrieval approaches. Both the scale and impact of these possibilities for the evaluation of retrieval systems are demonstrated by the design of an empirical experiment that covers more than 13,000 individual system configurations. This experimental set-up is tested on four test collections for ad-hoc search. The results of this experiment are manifold. For instance, particular implementations of ranking models fail systematically on all tested collections. The exploratory analysis of the ranking models empirically confirms the relationships between different implementations of models that share theoretical foundations. The obtained results also suggest that the impact on retrieval effectiveness of most instances of IR system components depends on the test collections that are being used for evaluation. Due to the scale of the designed component-level evaluation experiment, not all possible interactions of the system component under examination could be analysed in this work. For this reason the resulting data set will be made publicly available to the entire research community. / Das Forschungsgebiet Information Retrieval befasst sich mit Theorien und Modellen, die die Grundlage für jegliche Dienste bilden, die als Antwort auf ein formuliertes Informationsbedürfnis den Zugang zu oder einen Verweis auf entsprechende Elemente einer Dokumentsammlung ermöglichen. Die Qualität von Suchalgorithmen wird im Teilgebiet Information Retrieval Evaluation untersucht. Der klassische Ansatz für den empirischen Vergleich von Retrievalsystemen basiert auf dem Cranfield-Paradigma und nutzt einen spezifischen Korpus mit einer Menge von Beispielanfragen mit zugehörigen Relevanzbewertungen. Internationale Evaluationskampagnen, wie die Text Retrieval Conference, haben in den vergangenen zwei Jahrzehnten zu großen Fortschritten in der Methodik der empirischen Bewertung von Suchverfahren geführt. Der generelle Fokus dieses systembasierten Ansatzes liegt jedoch nach wie vor auf dem Vergleich der Gesamtsysteme, dass heißt die Systeme werden als Black Box betrachtet. In jüngster Zeit ist diese Evaluationsmethode vor allem aufgrund des Black-Box-Charakters des Untersuchungsgegenstandes in die Kritik geraten. Aktuelle Arbeiten fordern einen differenzierteren Blick in die einzelnen Systemeigenschaften, bzw. ihrer Komponenten. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird ein generischer Ansatz zur komponentenbasierten Evaluation von Retrievalsystemen vorgestellt und empirisch untersucht. Der Fokus der vorliegenden Dissertation liegt deshalb auf zentralen Komponenten, die für die Bearbeitung klassischer Ad-Hoc Suchprobleme, wie dem Finden von Büchern zu einem bestimmten Thema in einer Menge von Bibliothekseinträgen, wichtig sind. Ein zentraler Ansatz der Arbeit ist die Weiterentwicklung des Xtrieval Frameworks mittels der Integration weitverbreiteter Retrievalsysteme mit dem Ziel der gegenseitigen Eliminierung systemspezifischer Schwächen. Herausragende Ergebnisse im internationalen Vergleich, für verschiedenste Suchprobleme, verdeutlichen sowohl das Potenzial des Ansatzes als auch die Flexibilität des Xtrieval Frameworks. Moderne Retrievalsysteme beinhalten zahlreiche Komponenten, die für die Lösung spezifischer Teilaufgaben im gesamten Retrievalprozess wichtig sind. Die hier vorgelegte Arbeit ermöglicht die genaue Betrachtung der einzelnen Komponenten des Ad-hoc Retrievals. Hierfür wird mit Xtrieval ein Framework dargestellt, welches ein breites Spektrum an Verfahren flexibel miteinander kombinieren lässt. Das System ist offen konzipiert und ermöglicht die Integration weiterer Verfahren sowie die Bearbeitung weiterer Retrievalaufgaben jenseits des Ad-hoc Retrieval. Damit wird die bislang in der Forschung verschiedentlich geforderte aber bislang nicht erfolgreich umgesetzte komponentenbasierte Evaluation von Retrievalverfahren ermöglicht. Mächtigkeit und Bedeutung dieser Evaluationsmöglichkeiten werden anhand ausgewählter Instanzen der Komponenten in einer empirischen Analyse mit über 13.000 Systemkonfigurationen gezeigt. Die Ergebnisse auf den vier untersuchten Ad-Hoc Testkollektionen sind vielfältig. So wurden beispielsweise systematische Fehler bestimmter Ranking-Modelle identifiziert und die theoretischen Zusammenhänge zwischen spezifischen Klassen dieser Modelle anhand empirischer Ergebnisse nachgewiesen. Der Maßstab des durchgeführten Experiments macht eine Analyse aller möglichen Einflüsse und Zusammenhänge zwischen den untersuchten Komponenten unmöglich. Daher werden die erzeugten empirischen Daten für weitere Studien öffentlich bereitgestellt.

Titel: Lagerhantering och Automated Storage and Retrieval System (AS/RS) – En flerfallstudie om Automated Storage and Retrieval systems för- och nackdelar för en kostnadseffektiv lagerhantering Kurs: Examensarbete i Controller för Civilekonomprogrammet, 30 hp (4FE18E) Lärosäte: Ekonomihögskolan vid Linnéuniversitetet i Växjö Författare: Anton Lindh Inledning: Lagerverksamheten har fått en ökad betydelse för företags framgång. Designen på moderna lager har en stor påverkan på investering- och driftkostnad. Vidare sätter e-handelns ökning samt kunders krav press på lagerverksamheter i form av ökat behov av lagerutrymme, behov av alternativ för att hålla nere höga personalkostnader samt snabba leveranser. Automated Storage and Retrieval systems (AS/RS) är ett automatiserat lagersystem som ökar stadigt i användning hos stora företag. I uppsatsen görs försök att undersöka hur för- och nackdelarna påverkar kostnadseffektiviteten av lagerhanteringen och lagerverksamheten. Även huvudtyperna av AS/R system samt AS/R systemets komponenter undersöks för att ge en möjlig förklaring till hur dessa påverkar utfallet av systemets kostnadseffektivitet Syfte: Syftet med uppsatsen är att kartlägga de för- och nackdelar som AS/R system bidrar till lagerhanteringen samt hur för- och nackdelarna kan påverka hur kostnadseffektiv lagerhantering blir. En del av syftet med att besvara fråga 1 och 2 är att kunna vidare djupdyka i och analysera de olika typer och komponenter ett AS/RS består av och se hur dem specifikt kan bidra till slutsatserna av fråga 2. Besvarandet av frågorna ska bidra till ökadförståelse om hur AS/RS på olika sätt kan hjälpa (eller stjälpa) lagerverksamheten och lagerhanteringen att bli mer kostnadseffektiv hos företagMetod: I uppsatsen har en flerfallstudie genomförts med 3 företag som tillsammans har 4 AS/R system. Den empiriska materialinsamlingen skedde genom semistrukturerade intervjuer. Slutsats: Slutsatserna belyser flera för- och nackdelar. Framstående slutsatser inkluderar nackdelar såsom att AS/R system har höga initiala investeringskostnader samt flera flexibilitetsproblem som kan hindra en kostnadseffektiv lagerhantering. Å andra sidan har flera fördelar belysts såsom hög genomströmningskapacitet på grund av underlättande av rutiner och högre produktivitet tillsammans med lägre personalkostnader och minskad ytanvändning. Två analytiska modeller är även presenterade för slutsatserna kring AS/R systemens huvudtyper samt komponenter och deras påverkan på en kostnadseffektiv lagerhantering.

This work addresses the need for an alternative to keyword-based search for sifting through large PDF medical journal article document collections for literature review purposes. Despite users' best efforts to form precise and accurate queries, it is often difficult to guess the right keywords to find all the related articles while finding a minimum number of unrelated ones. Failure during literature review to find relevant, related research results in wasted research time and effort in addition to missing significant work in the related area which could affect the quality of the research work being conducted. The purpose of this work is to explore the benefits of a retrieval system for professional journal articles in PDF format that supports hybrid queries composed of both text and images. PDF medical journal articles contain formatting and layout information that imply the structure and organization of the document. They also contain figures and tables rich with content and meaning. Stripping a PDF into “full-text” for indexing purposes disregards these important features. Specifically, this work investigated the following: (1) what effect the incorporation of a document's embedded figures into the query (in addition to its text) has on retrieval performance (precision) compared to plain keyword-based search; (2) how current text-based document-query similarity methods can be enhanced by using formatting and font-size information as a structure and organization model for a PDF document; (3) whether to use the standard Euclidean distance function or the matrix distance function for content-based image retrieval; (4) how to convert a PDF into a structured, formatted, reflowable XML representation given a pure-layout PDF document; (5) what document views (such as a term frequency cloud, a document outline, or a document's figures) would help users wade through search results to quickly select those that are worth a closer look. While the results of the experiments were unexpectedly worse than their baselines of comparison (see the conclusion for a summary), the experimental methods are very valuable in showing others what directions have already been pursued and why they did not work and what remaining problems need to be solved in order to achieve the goal of improving literature review through use of a hybrid text and image retrieval system.

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.