Human-robot interaction (HRI) is the study of how we as humans interact and communicate with robots and one of its subfields is working on how we can improve the collaboration between humans and robots. We need robots that are more user friendly and easier to understand and a key aspect of this is human-like movements and behavior. This project targets a specific set of motions called locomotion and tests them on the humanoid NAO robot. A human-like crawling gait was developed for the NAO robot and compared to the built-in walking gait through three kinds of experiments. The first one to compare the speed of the two gaits, the second one to estimate their sta- bility, and the third to examine how long they can operate by measuring the power consumption and temperatures in the joints. The results showed the robot was significantly slower when crawling compared to walking, and when still the robot was more stable while standing than on all-fours. The power consumption remained essentially the same, but the crawling gait ended up having a shorter operational time due to higher temperature increase in the joints. While the crawling gait has benefits of having a lower profile then the walking gait and could therefore more easily pass under low hanging obsta- cles, it does have major issues that needs to be addressed to become a viable solution. Therefore these are important factors to consider when developing gaits and designing robots, and motives further research to try and solve these problems.

Os motores de busca tradicionais utilizam técnicas que rastreiam as páginas na Web através de links HTML. Porém a maior parte da Web não é acessada por essas técnicas. A parcela da Web não acessada é chamada de Web oculta. Uma enorme quantidade de informação estruturada e de melhor qualidade que a presente na Web tradicional está disponível atrás das interfaces de busca, os formulários que são pontos de entrada para a Web oculta. Essa porção da Web é de difícil acesso para os motores de busca, pois o preenchimento correto dos formulários representa um grande desafio, dado que foram construídos para a manipulação humana e possuem grande variabilidade e diversidade de línguas e domínios. O grande desafio é selecionar os valores corretos para os campos do formulário, realizando um número reduzido de submissões que obtenha a cobertura da maior parte da base de dados por trás do formulário. Vários trabalhos propõem métodos para busca na Web oculta, porém a maior parte deles apresenta grandes limitações para a aplicação automática na Web. Entre as principais limitações estão a dependência de informação prévia a respeito do domínio dos formulários, o não tratamento de todos os tipos de campos que um formulário pode apresentar e a correta seleção de um subgrupo do conjunto de todas as possibilidades de preenchimento de um formulário. No presente trabalho é apresentada uma arquitetura genérica para o preenchimento automático de formulários. A principal contribuição dessa arquitetura consiste na seleção de valores para o preenchimento de formulários através do método ITP (Instance template pruning). para o preenchimento de formulários através do método ITP (Instance template pruning). Muitos formulários apresentam um número inviável de possibilidades de preenchimento quando combinam os valores dos campos. O método ITP consegue reduzir drasticamente o número de possibilidades. A poda de diversas consultas é possível à medida que as submissões são feitas e o conhecimento a respeito do formulário é obtido. Os experimentos realizados mostraram que o método proposto é superior ao método utilizado como baseline. A comparação foi feita com o método que representa o estado da arte. O método proposto pode ser utilizado em conjunto com outros métodos de forma a obter uma busca efetiva na Web oculta. Desta forma, os experimentos a partir da combinação do ITP com o baseline também implicaram em bons resultados. / The traditional search engines crawl the Web pages through HTML links. However, the biggest part of the Web is invisible for these crawlers. The portion of the Web which is not accessed is called hidden Web. An enormous quantity of structured data and with higher quality than in the traditional Web is available behind search interfaces, the forms that are the entry points to the hidden Web. Access this part of theWeb by search engines is difficult because the correct filling of forms represent a big challenge. Since these forms are built for human manipulation and have big variability and diversity of domains and languages. The challenge is to select the correct values to fill the form fields, with a few number of submissions that reach good coverage of the database behind the form. Several works proposed methods to search the hidden Web. Most of these works present big limitations for an application that surfaces the entire Web in a horizontal and automatic way. The main limitations are the dependency of prior information about the form domains, the non-treatment of the all form field types and the correct selection of a subgroup of the set of all form filling possibilities. In the present work is presented a generic architecture for the automatic form filling. The main contribution of this architecture is the selection of values for the form submission through the ITP (Instance Template Pruning) method. Several forms have an infeasible number of form filling possibilities when combining all fields and values. The ITP method can drastically reduce the number of possibilities. The prune of many possible queries is feasible as the submissions are made and the knowledge about the form is obtained. The results of the experiments performed indicate that the ITP method is superior to the baseline utilized. The comparison is made with the method that represents the state of the art. The proposed method can be used with other methods in order to an effective search in the hidden Web. Therefore, the results by the combination of ITP and baseline methods also have implicated in good results.

Os motores de busca tradicionais utilizam técnicas que rastreiam as páginas na Web através de links HTML. Porém a maior parte da Web não é acessada por essas técnicas. A parcela da Web não acessada é chamada de Web oculta. Uma enorme quantidade de informação estruturada e de melhor qualidade que a presente na Web tradicional está disponível atrás das interfaces de busca, os formulários que são pontos de entrada para a Web oculta. Essa porção da Web é de difícil acesso para os motores de busca, pois o preenchimento correto dos formulários representa um grande desafio, dado que foram construídos para a manipulação humana e possuem grande variabilidade e diversidade de línguas e domínios. O grande desafio é selecionar os valores corretos para os campos do formulário, realizando um número reduzido de submissões que obtenha a cobertura da maior parte da base de dados por trás do formulário. Vários trabalhos propõem métodos para busca na Web oculta, porém a maior parte deles apresenta grandes limitações para a aplicação automática na Web. Entre as principais limitações estão a dependência de informação prévia a respeito do domínio dos formulários, o não tratamento de todos os tipos de campos que um formulário pode apresentar e a correta seleção de um subgrupo do conjunto de todas as possibilidades de preenchimento de um formulário. No presente trabalho é apresentada uma arquitetura genérica para o preenchimento automático de formulários. A principal contribuição dessa arquitetura consiste na seleção de valores para o preenchimento de formulários através do método ITP (Instance template pruning). para o preenchimento de formulários através do método ITP (Instance template pruning). Muitos formulários apresentam um número inviável de possibilidades de preenchimento quando combinam os valores dos campos. O método ITP consegue reduzir drasticamente o número de possibilidades. A poda de diversas consultas é possível à medida que as submissões são feitas e o conhecimento a respeito do formulário é obtido. Os experimentos realizados mostraram que o método proposto é superior ao método utilizado como baseline. A comparação foi feita com o método que representa o estado da arte. O método proposto pode ser utilizado em conjunto com outros métodos de forma a obter uma busca efetiva na Web oculta. Desta forma, os experimentos a partir da combinação do ITP com o baseline também implicaram em bons resultados. / The traditional search engines crawl the Web pages through HTML links. However, the biggest part of the Web is invisible for these crawlers. The portion of the Web which is not accessed is called hidden Web. An enormous quantity of structured data and with higher quality than in the traditional Web is available behind search interfaces, the forms that are the entry points to the hidden Web. Access this part of theWeb by search engines is difficult because the correct filling of forms represent a big challenge. Since these forms are built for human manipulation and have big variability and diversity of domains and languages. The challenge is to select the correct values to fill the form fields, with a few number of submissions that reach good coverage of the database behind the form. Several works proposed methods to search the hidden Web. Most of these works present big limitations for an application that surfaces the entire Web in a horizontal and automatic way. The main limitations are the dependency of prior information about the form domains, the non-treatment of the all form field types and the correct selection of a subgroup of the set of all form filling possibilities. In the present work is presented a generic architecture for the automatic form filling. The main contribution of this architecture is the selection of values for the form submission through the ITP (Instance Template Pruning) method. Several forms have an infeasible number of form filling possibilities when combining all fields and values. The ITP method can drastically reduce the number of possibilities. The prune of many possible queries is feasible as the submissions are made and the knowledge about the form is obtained. The results of the experiments performed indicate that the ITP method is superior to the baseline utilized. The comparison is made with the method that represents the state of the art. The proposed method can be used with other methods in order to an effective search in the hidden Web. Therefore, the results by the combination of ITP and baseline methods also have implicated in good results.

Os motores de busca tradicionais utilizam técnicas que rastreiam as páginas na Web através de links HTML. Porém a maior parte da Web não é acessada por essas técnicas. A parcela da Web não acessada é chamada de Web oculta. Uma enorme quantidade de informação estruturada e de melhor qualidade que a presente na Web tradicional está disponível atrás das interfaces de busca, os formulários que são pontos de entrada para a Web oculta. Essa porção da Web é de difícil acesso para os motores de busca, pois o preenchimento correto dos formulários representa um grande desafio, dado que foram construídos para a manipulação humana e possuem grande variabilidade e diversidade de línguas e domínios. O grande desafio é selecionar os valores corretos para os campos do formulário, realizando um número reduzido de submissões que obtenha a cobertura da maior parte da base de dados por trás do formulário. Vários trabalhos propõem métodos para busca na Web oculta, porém a maior parte deles apresenta grandes limitações para a aplicação automática na Web. Entre as principais limitações estão a dependência de informação prévia a respeito do domínio dos formulários, o não tratamento de todos os tipos de campos que um formulário pode apresentar e a correta seleção de um subgrupo do conjunto de todas as possibilidades de preenchimento de um formulário. No presente trabalho é apresentada uma arquitetura genérica para o preenchimento automático de formulários. A principal contribuição dessa arquitetura consiste na seleção de valores para o preenchimento de formulários através do método ITP (Instance template pruning). para o preenchimento de formulários através do método ITP (Instance template pruning). Muitos formulários apresentam um número inviável de possibilidades de preenchimento quando combinam os valores dos campos. O método ITP consegue reduzir drasticamente o número de possibilidades. A poda de diversas consultas é possível à medida que as submissões são feitas e o conhecimento a respeito do formulário é obtido. Os experimentos realizados mostraram que o método proposto é superior ao método utilizado como baseline. A comparação foi feita com o método que representa o estado da arte. O método proposto pode ser utilizado em conjunto com outros métodos de forma a obter uma busca efetiva na Web oculta. Desta forma, os experimentos a partir da combinação do ITP com o baseline também implicaram em bons resultados. / The traditional search engines crawl the Web pages through HTML links. However, the biggest part of the Web is invisible for these crawlers. The portion of the Web which is not accessed is called hidden Web. An enormous quantity of structured data and with higher quality than in the traditional Web is available behind search interfaces, the forms that are the entry points to the hidden Web. Access this part of theWeb by search engines is difficult because the correct filling of forms represent a big challenge. Since these forms are built for human manipulation and have big variability and diversity of domains and languages. The challenge is to select the correct values to fill the form fields, with a few number of submissions that reach good coverage of the database behind the form. Several works proposed methods to search the hidden Web. Most of these works present big limitations for an application that surfaces the entire Web in a horizontal and automatic way. The main limitations are the dependency of prior information about the form domains, the non-treatment of the all form field types and the correct selection of a subgroup of the set of all form filling possibilities. In the present work is presented a generic architecture for the automatic form filling. The main contribution of this architecture is the selection of values for the form submission through the ITP (Instance Template Pruning) method. Several forms have an infeasible number of form filling possibilities when combining all fields and values. The ITP method can drastically reduce the number of possibilities. The prune of many possible queries is feasible as the submissions are made and the knowledge about the form is obtained. The results of the experiments performed indicate that the ITP method is superior to the baseline utilized. The comparison is made with the method that represents the state of the art. The proposed method can be used with other methods in order to an effective search in the hidden Web. Therefore, the results by the combination of ITP and baseline methods also have implicated in good results.

Use of ontology is an approach to overcome the &ldquo / search-on-the-net&rdquo / problem. An ontology based web information retrieval system requires a topical web crawler to construct a high quality document collection. This thesis focuses on implementing a topical web crawler with medical domain ontology in order to find out the advantages of ontological information in web crawling. Crawler is implemented with Best-First search algorithm. Design of the crawler is optimized to UMLS ontology. Crawler is tested with Harvest Rate and Target Recall Metrics and compared to a non-ontology based Best-First Crawler. Performed test results proved that ontology use in crawler URL selection algorithm improved the crawler performance by 76%.

In recent years, the act of scraping websites for information has become increasingly relevant. However, along with this increase in interest, the internet has also grown substantially and advances and improvements to websites over the years have in fact made it more difficult to scrape. One key reason for this is that scrapers simply account for a significant portion of the traffic to many websites, and so developers often implement anti-scraping measures along with the Robots Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt) to try to stymie this traffic. The popular use of dynamically loaded content – content which loads after user interaction – poses another problem for scrapers. In this paper, we have researched what kinds of issues commonly occur when scraping and crawling websites – more specifically when scraping social media – and how to solve them. In order to understand these issues better and to test solutions, a literature review was performed and design and creation methods were used to develop a prototype scraper using the frameworks Scrapy and Selenium. We found that automating interaction with dynamic elements worked best to solve the problem of dynamically loaded content. We also theorize that having an artificial random delay when scraping and randomizing intervals between each visit to a website would counteract some of the anti-scraping measures. Another, smaller aspect of our research was the legality and ethicality of scraping. Further thoughts and comments on potential solutions to other issues have also been included.

No description available.

Chatbots are computer programs with the capability to lead a conversation with a human user. When a chatbot is unable to match a user’s utterance to any predefined answer, it will use a fallback intent; a generic response that does not contribute to the conversation in any meaningful way. This report aims to investigate if a content-based recommender system could provide support to a chatbot agent in case of these fallback experiences. Content-based recommender systems use content to filter, prioritize and deliver relevant information to users. Their purpose is to search through a large amount of content and predict recommendations based on user requirements. The recommender system developed in this project consists of four components: a web spider, a Bag-of-words model, a graph database, and the GraphQL API. The anticipation was to capture web page articles and rank them with a numeric scoring to figure out which articles that make for the best recommendation concerning given subjects. The chatbot agent could then use these recommended articles to provide the user with value and help instead of a generic response. After the evaluation, it was found that the recommender system in principle fulfilled all requirements, but that the scoring algorithm used could achieve significant improvements in its recommendations if a more advanced algorithm would be implemented. The scoring algorithm used in this project is based on word count, which lacks taking the context of the dialogue between the user and the agent into consideration, among other things.

O treinamento de sistemas de Tradução de Máquina baseada em Estatística (TME) é bastante dependente da disponibilidade de corpora paralelos. Entretanto, este tipo de recurso costuma ser difícil de ser encontrado, especialmente quando lida com idiomas com poucos recursos ou com tópicos muito específicos, como, por exemplo, dermatologia. Para contornar esta situação, uma possibilidade é utilizar corpora comparáveis, que são recursos muito mais abundantes. Um modo de adquirir corpora comparáveis é a aplicação de algoritmos de Coleta Focada (CF). Neste trabalho, são propostas novas abordagens para CF, algumas baseadas em n-gramas e outras no poder expressivo das expressões multipalavra. Também são avaliadas a viabilidade do uso de CF para realização de adaptação de domínio para sistemas genéricos de TME e se há alguma correlação entre a qualidade dos algoritmos de CF e dos sistemas de TME que podem ser construídos a partir dos respectivos dados coletados. Os resultados indicam que algoritmos de CF podem ser bons meios para adquirir corpora comparáveis para realizar adaptação de domínio para TME e que há uma correlação entre a qualidade dos dois processos. / Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) is highly dependent on the availability of parallel corpora for training. However, these kinds of resource may be hard to be found, especially when dealing with under-resourced languages or very specific domains, like the dermatology. For working this situation around, one possibility is the use of comparable corpora, which are much more abundant resources. One way of acquiring comparable corpora is to apply Focused Crawling (FC) algorithms. In this work we propose novel approach for FC algorithms, some based on n-grams and other on the expressive power of multiword expressions. We also assess the viability of using FC for performing domain adaptations for generic SMT systems and whether there is a correlation between the quality of the FC algorithms and of the SMT systems that can be built with its collected data. Results indicate that the use of FCs is, indeed, a good way for acquiring comparable corpora for SMT domain adaptation and that there is a correlation between the qualities of both processes.

The problem considered in this thesis is the development of an autonomous prototype robot capable of gathering sensory information from its environment allowing it to provide feedback on the condition of specific targets to aid in maintenance of hydro equipment. The context for the solution to this problem is based on the power grid environment operated by the local hydro utility. The intent is to monitor power line structures by travelling along skywire located at the top of towers, providing a view of everything beneath it including, for example, insulators, conductors, and towers. The contribution of this thesis is a novel robot design with the potential to prevent hazardous situations and the use of rough coverage feedback modified reinforcement learning algorithms to establish behaviours. / October 2007