Bücher von Mounia Lalmas

Documents usually have a content and a structure. The content refers to the text of the document, whereas the structure refers to how a document is logically organized. An increasingly common way to encode the structure is through the use of a mark-up language. Nowadays, the most widely used mark-up language for representing structure is the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML). XML can be used to provide a focused access to documents, i.e. returning XML elements, such as sections and paragraphs, instead of whole documents in response to a query. Such focused strategies are of particular benefit for information repositories containing long documents, or documents covering a wide variety of topics, where users are directed to the most relevant content within a document. The increased adoption of XML to represent a document structure requires the development of tools to effectively access documents marked-up in XML. This book provides a detailed description of query languages, indexing strategies, ranking algorithms, presentation scenarios developed to access XML documents. Major advances in XML retrieval were seen from 2002 as a result of INEX, the Initiative for Evaluation of XML Retrieval. INEX, also described in this book, provided test sets for evaluating XML retrieval effectiveness. Many of the developments and results described in this book were investigated within INEX. Table of Contents: Introduction / Basic XML Concepts / Historical Perspectives / Query Languages / Indexing Strategies / Ranking Strategies / Presentation Strategies / Evaluating XML Retrieval Effectiveness / Conclusions

User engagement refers to the quality of the user experience that emphasizes the positive aspects of interacting with an online application and, in particular, the desire to use that application longer and repeatedly. User engagement is a key concept in the design of online applications (whether for desktop, tablet or mobile), motivated by the observation that successful applications are not just used, but are engaged with. Users invest time, attention, and emotion in their use of technology, and seek to satisfy pragmatic and hedonic needs. Measurement is critical for evaluating whether online applications are able to successfully engage users, and may inform the design of and use of applications. User engagement is a multifaceted, complex phenomenon; this gives rise to a number of potential measurement approaches. Common ways to evaluate user engagement include using self-report measures, e.g., questionnaires; observational methods, e.g. facial expression analysis, speech analysis; neuro-physiological signal processing methods, e.g., respiratory and cardiovascular accelerations and decelerations, muscle spasms; and web analytics, e.g., number of site visits, click depth. These methods represent various trade-offs in terms of the setting (laboratory versus ``in the wild''), object of measurement (user behaviour, affect or cognition) and scale of data collected. For instance, small-scale user studies are deep and rich, but limited in terms of generalizability, whereas large-scale web analytic studies are powerful but negate users' motivation and context. The focus of this book is how user engagement is currently being measured and various considerations for its measurement. Our goal is to leave readers with an appreciation of the various ways in which to measure user engagement, and their associated strengths and weaknesses. We emphasize the multifaceted nature of user engagement and the unique contextual constraints that come to bear upon attempts to measure engagement in different settings, and across different user groups and web domains. At the same time, this book advocates for the development of ``good'' measures and good measurement practices that will advance the study of user engagement and improve our understanding of this construct, which has become so vital in our wired world.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2006, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in December 2006. The papers are organized in topical sections on methodology and seven additional tracks on ad-hoc, natural language processing, heterogeneous collection, multimedia, interactive, use case, as well as document mining.

Content-oriented XML retrieval has been receiving increasing interest due to the widespread use of eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which is becoming a standard document format on the Web, in digital libraries,and publishing. By exploiting the enriched source of syntactic and semantic information that XML markup provides, XML information retrieval (IR) systems aim to implement a more focused retrieval strategy and return document components, so-called XML elements - instead of complete documents - in response to a user query. This focused retrieval approach is of particular bene?t for collections containing long documents or documents covering a wide variety of topics (e.g., books, user manuals, legal documents, etc.), where users' e?ort to locate relevant content can be reduced by directing them to the most relevant parts of the documents. Implementing this, more focused, retrieval paradigm means that an XML IR system needs not only to ?nd relevant information in the XML documents, but it also has to determine the appropriate level of granularity to be returned to the user. In addition, the relevance of a retrieved component may be dependent on meeting both content and structural query conditions.

The ultimate goal of many information access systems (e.g., digital libraries, the Web, intranets) is to provide the right content to their end-users. This content is increasingly a mixture of text, multimedia, and metadata, and is formatted according to the adopted -W3C standard for information repositories, the so-called eXtensible Markup L- guage (XML). Whereas many of today's information access systems still treat do- ments as single large (text) blocks, XML offers the opportunity to exploit the internal structure of documents in order to allow for more precise access thus providing more specific answers to user requests. Providing effective access to XML-based content is therefore a key issue for the success of these systems. The aim of the INEX campaign (Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval), which was set up at the beginning of 2002, is to establish infrastructures, XML test suites, and appropriate measurements for evaluating the performance of information retrieval systems that aim at giving effective access to XML content. More precisely, the goal of the INEX initiative is to provide means, in the form of a large XML test collection and appropriate scoring methods, for the evaluation of content-oriented XML retrieval systems.