The human body is most likely to ingest microbes or disinfection by-products (DBPs) in drinking water. More than 80% of water treatment plants use chlorine as a disinfectant. Approximately 14–16% of the bladder cancers in Ontario, Canada, are attributable to the drinking waters containing relatively high levels of chlorinated by-products (CBPs). In recent studies, in addition to the chronic can...

In this study the rankings of IR systems based on binary and graded relevance in TREC 7 and 8 data are compared. Relevance of a sample TREC results is reassessed using a relevance scale with four levels: non-relevant, marginally relevant, fairly relevant, highly relevant. Twenty-one topics and 90 systems from TREC 7 and 20 topics and 121 systems from TREC 8 form the data. Binary precision, and ...

The mining of social networks entails a high degree of computational complexity. This complexity is exacerbate when considering longitudinal social network data. To address this complexity issue three weighting schemes are proposed in this paper. The fundamental idea is to reduce the complexity by considering only the most significant nodes and links. The proposed weighting schemes have been in...

We present further evidence suggesting the feasibilty of using information theoretic query expansion for improving the retrieval effectiveness of automatic document ranking . Compared to our participation in TREC-7, in which we applied this technique to an ineffective initial ranking, here we show that information theoretic query expansion may be effective even when the quality of the first pas...

Domain adaptation for statistical machine translation is the task of altering general models to improve performance on the test domain. In this work, we suggest several novel weighting schemes based on translation models for adapted phrase extraction. To calculate the weights, we first phrase align the general bilingual training data, then, using domain specific translation models, the aligned ...

One of the key challenges of microarray studies is to derive biological insights from the gene-expression patterns. Clustering genes by functional keyword association can provide direct information about the functional links among genes. However, the quality of the keyword lists significantly affects the clustering results. We compared two keyword weighting schemes: normalised z-score and term ...

Sentiment analysis aims to determine the polarity that is embedded in people comments and reviews. Sentiment analysis is important for companies and organisations which are interested in evaluating their products or services. The current paper deals with sentiment analysis in Arabic reviews. Three classifiers were applied on an in-house developed dataset of tweets/comments. In particular, the N...

The paper proposes a set of techniques for improving the quality of MLS surfaces reconstructed from point clouds that are composed by the union of many scanned range maps. The main idea of those techniques is that the range-map structure should be exploited during the reconstruction process and not lost in the uniform point soup that is usually fed into reconstruction algorithms; on this purpos...