The goal of Web search personalization is to tailor search results to a particular user based on that user’s interests and preferences, thus allowing for more efficient information access. One of the key factors for effective personalization of information access is the user context. We present an approach to personalized search that involves building models of users context as ontological prof...

The spread of disease through a physical-contact network and the spread of information about the disease on a communication network are two intimately related dynamical processes. We investigate the asymmetrical interplay between the two types of spreading dynamics, each occurring on its own layer, by focusing on the two fundamental quantities underlying any spreading process: epidemic threshol...

Most recommender system methods derive the user preferences from predefined information sources. For example, collaborative filtering is based on user rating values on items. Predefining information sources constrains the quality of the recommendation result by restricting the amount of information the recommendation method can operate on. In this paper we introduce an adaptive rating estimatio...

Online Social Networks generate a prodigious wealth of real-time information at an incessant rate. In this paper we study the empirical data that crawled from Twitter to describe the topology and information spreading dynamics of Online Social Networks. We propose a measurement with three measures to state the efforts of users on Twitter to get their information spreading, based on the unique m...

Epidemic spreading phenomena are ubiquitous in nature and society. Examples include the spreading of diseases, information, and computer viruses. Epidemics can spread by local spreading, where infected nodes can only infect a limited set of direct target nodes and global spreading, where an infected node can infect every other node. In reality, many epidemics spread using a hybrid mixture of bo...

In this paper we present a multilingual information retrieval system that provides access to Tourism information by exploiting the intuitiveness of natural language. In particular, we describe the knowledge representation model underlying the information retrieval system. This knowledge representation approach is based on associative networks and allows the definition of semantic relationships ...

One of the key factors for effective personalization of information access is the user context. We propose a framework which integrates several critical elements that make up the user context, namely, the user’s short-term behavior, semantic knowledge from ontologies that provide explicit representations of the domain of interest, and long-term user profiles revealing interests and trends. Our ...

A user’s information need, normally represented as a search query, can be satisfied by creating a query focused coherent and readable summary, by fusing the relevant parts of information from multiple documents. While aggregating the information from multiple documents, the quality of the summary is improved by eliminating redundant information from the document set. In this paper, we focus on ...

A spreading activation model is proposed for the purpose of automatically merging databases with heterogeneous indexing systems. An overview of the connectionist approaches in information retrieval (IR) is discussed. Then, spreading activation models of IR are compared with the vector space models that have been widely adopted in the development of IR systems. Based upon the review of the previ...

A traditional paradigm for retrieval from a conceptual knowledge base is to gather up indices or features used to discriminate among or locate items in memory, and then perform a retrieval operation to obtain matching items. These items may then be evaluated for their degree of match against the input. This type of approach to retrieval has some problems. It requires one to look explicitly for ...