Now showing 1 - 10 of 65
  • Publication
    Can proactive behavior turn chatterbots into conversational agents?
    ( 2005)
    L'Abbate, M.
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    Thiel, U.
    ;
    Kamps, T.
  • Publication
    Statistical relationship determination in automatic thesaurus construction
    ( 2005)
    Chen, L.
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    Fankhauser, P.
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    Thiel, U.
    ;
    Kamps, T.
  • Publication
    Queries in context: Access to digitized historic documents in a collaboratory for the humanities
    ( 2005)
    Thiel, U.
    ;
    Brocks, H.
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    Dirsch-Weigand, A.
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    Everts, A.
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    Frommholz, I.
    ;
    Stein, A.
    In contrast to standard digital libraries, systems addressing the specific requirements of cultural heritage need to deal with digitized material like scanned documents instead of home digital items. Such systems aim at providing the means for domain experts, e.g. historians, to collaboratively work with the given material. To support their work, automatic indexing mechanisms for both textual and pictorial digitized documents need to be combined with retrieval methods exploiting the content as well as the context of information items for precise searches. In the COLLATE project we devised several access methods using textual contents, feature extraction from images, metadata, and annotations provided by the users.
  • Publication
    Supporting information access in next generation digital library architectures
    ( 2005)
    Frommholz, I.
    ;
    Knezevic, P.
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    Mehta, B.
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    Niederée, C.
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    Risse, T.
    ;
    Thiel, U.
    Current developments on Service-oriented Architectures, Peer-to-Peer and Grid computing promise more open and flexible architectures for digital libraries. They will open the Digital Library (DL) technology to a wider clientele, allow faster adaptability and enable the usage of federative models on content and service provision. These technologies raise new challenges for the realization of DL functionalities, which are rooted in the increased heterogeneity of content, services and metadata, in the higher degree of distribution and dynamics, as well as in the omission of a central control instance. This paper discusses these opportunities and challenges for three central types of DL functionality revolving around information access: metadata management, retrieval functionality, and personalization services.
  • Publication
    The layer-seeds term clustering method: Enabling proactive situation-aware product recommendations in e-commerce dialogues
    ( 2005)
    Chen, L.
    ;
    L'Abbate, M.
    ;
    Thiel, U.
    ;
    Neuhold, E.J.
    In e-commerce it is often crucial to provide customers a large choice of relevant offers. Users, however, seldom provides complete and comprehensive descriptions of their desires, therefore user interfaces are needed that can generate automatically expanded queries to the product database and proactively enrich the ongoing dialogue with recommendations of suitable products. Automatic query expansion is mostly based on thesaurus and/or user profiles. In e-commerce applications, specific thesauri reflecting the webstore's product categories are desirable. This work describes a method for the automatic construction of a thesaurus based on existing categories of documents. A clustering algorithm, the "Layer-Seeds method", is introduced, which facilitates the automatic generation of thesaurus reflecting the specific vocabulary occurring in a given collection of documents. The clustering works on terms extracted from the documents in a certain category and organizes them in a tree-like hierarchical structure-a thesaurus. The thesaurus is then employed for automatic query expansion in an e-commerce application in order to obtain better results for product searching. Experiments yield evidence that a significant increase of user satisfaction is achieved.
  • Publication
    Agent-based assistance in a digital library user interface
    ( 2005)
    Thiel, U.
    ;
    Brocks, H.
    ;
    Stein, A.
  • Publication
    Collaborative research and documentation of European film history
    ( 2004)
    Stein, A.
    ;
    Keiper, J.
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    Bezerra, L.
    ;
    Brocks, H.
    ;
    Thiel, U.
  • Publication
    Supporting information access in next generation digital library architectures
    ( 2004)
    Frommholz, I.
    ;
    Knezevic, P.
    ;
    Mehta, B.
    ;
    Niederée, C.
    ;
    Risse, W.
    ;
    Thiel, U.
  • Publication
  • Publication
    Language modeling for effective construction of domain specific thesauri
    ( 2004)
    Chen, L.B.
    ;
    Thiel, U.
    In this paper we present an approach for effective construction of domain specific thesauri. We assume that the collection is partitioned into document categories. By taking advantage of these pre-defined categories, we are able to conceptualize a new topical language model to weight term topicality more accurately. With the help of information theory, interesting relationships among thesaurus elements are discovered deductively. Based on the "Layer-Seeds" clustering algorithm, topical terms from documents in a certain category will be organized according to their relationships in a tree-like hierarchical structure --- a thesaurus. Experimental results show that the thesaurus contains satisfactory structures, although it differs to some extent from a manually created thesaurus. A first evaluation of the thesaurus in a query expansion task yields evidence that an increase of recall can be achieved without loss of precision.