Yahoo! Pipes is a well-known, widely used visual programming environment for creating data mashups by aggregating, manipulating, and publishing web feeds. It provides a natural laboratory for observing a range of end-user programming (EUP) behaviors on a large scale. We have examined more than 30,000 Pipes compositions in a search for regularities that might inform the design of EUP systems and...

Question answering systems which automatically search for user’s information need are considered as a separate issue from the community-generated question answering which answers users’ questions by human respondents. Although the two answering systems have different applications, both of them aim to present a correct answer to the users’ question and consequently they can feed each other to im...

This study examined 38 EFL senior high school students’ Yahoo! online dictionary look-up behavior. In a language laboratory, the participants read an article on a reading sheet, underlined any words they did not know, looked up their unknown words in Yahoo! online bilingual dictionary, and wrote down the definitions of their looked-up words. The participants’ dictionary look-up records were col...

In this paper, we describe our participation in the NTCIR-13 STC Japanese Subtask, in which we develop systems with the retrieval-based method. To retrieve reply texts for a given comment text, our system generates vector representations of both the comment and candidate replies by a 3-layer LSTM-RNN and evaluate distances between the comment vector and the candidate reply vectors, selecting th...

In an increasingly polarized world, demagogues who reduce complexity down to simple arguments based on emotion are gaining in popularity. Are opinions and online discussions falling into demagoguery? In this work, we aim to provide computational tools to investigate this question and, by doing so, explore the nature and complexity of online discussions and their space of opinions, uncovering wh...

We describe the potential of current Web 2.0 technologies to achieve data mashup in the health care and life sciences (HCLS) domains, and compare that potential to the nascent trend of performing semantic mashup. After providing an overview of Web 2.0, we demonstrate two scenarios of data mashup, facilitated by the following Web 2.0 tools and sites: Yahoo! Pipes, Dapper, Google Maps and GeoComm...

This paper describes a question answering system built by a team from Emory University to participate in TREC LiveQA’15 shared task. The goal of this task was to automatically answer questions posted to Yahoo! Answers community question answering website in real-time. My system combines candidates extracted from answers to similar questions previously posted to Yahoo! Answers and web passages f...

This paper investigates the composition of search engine results pages. We define what elements the most popular web search engines use on their results pages (e.g., organic results, advertisements, shortcuts) and to which degree they are used for popular vs. rare queries. Therefore, we send 500 queries of both types to the major search engines Google, Yahoo, Live.com and Ask. We count how ofte...

Community question answering systems are forums where users can ask and answer questions in various categories. Examples are Yahoo! Answers, Quora, and Stack Overflow. A common challenge with such systems is that a significant percentage of asked questions are left unanswered. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to reduce the number of unanswered questions in Yahoo! Answers by reusing the an...

This paper seeks to explain the eBay-Yahoo! Auction phenomenon: while eBay charged sellers a listing fee and a percentage commission and Yahoo! Auction charged no fees at all, Yahoo! Auction, however, had a significantly lower sold-out rate than eBay, and eBay continued to dominate the C2C auction category. We combine three theoretical perspectives the economic, the psychological and the market...