Parallel streaming signature EM-tree: A clustering algorithm for web scale applications

The proliferation of the web presents an unsolved problem of automatically analyzing billions of pages of natural language. We introduce a scalable algorithm that clusters hundreds of millions of web pages into hundreds of thousands of clusters. It does this on a single mid-range machine using efficient algorithms and compressed document representations. It is applied to two web-scale crawls covering tens of terabytes. ClueWeb09 and ClueWeb12 contain 500 and 733 million web pages and were clustered into 500,000 to 700,000 clusters. To the best of our knowledge, such fine grained clustering has not been previously demonstrated. Previous approaches clustered a sample that limits the maximum number of discoverable clusters. The proposed EM-tree algorithm uses the entire collection in clustering and produces several orders of magnitude more clusters than the existing algorithms. Fine grained clustering is necessary for meaningful clustering in massive collections where the number of distinct topics grows linearly with collection size. These fine-grained clusters show an improved cluster quality when assessed with two novel evaluations using ad hoc search relevance judgments and spam classifications for external validation. These evaluations solve the problem of assessing the quality of clusters where categorical labeling is unavailable and unfeasible.

Enhanced student learning in accounting utilising web-based technology, peer-review feedback and reflective practices: A learning community approach to assessment

Higher education is becoming a major driver of economic competitiveness in an increasingly knowledge-driven global economy. Maintaining the competitive edge has seen an increase in public accountability of higher education institutions through the mechanism of ranking universities based on the quality of their teaching and learning outcomes. As a result, assessment processes are under scrutiny, creating tensions between standardisation and measurability and the development of creative and reflective learners. These tensions are further highlighted in the context of large undergraduate subjects, learner diversity and time-poor academics and students. Research suggests that high level and complex learning is best developed when assessment, combined with effective feedback practices, involves students as partners in these processes. This article reports on a four-phase, cross-institution and cross-discipline project designed to embed peer-review processes as part of the assessment in two large, undergraduate accounting classes. Using a social constructivist view of learning, which emphasises the role of both teacher and learner in the development of complex cognitive understandings, we undertook an iterative process of peer review. Successive phases built upon students’ feedback and achievements and input from language/learning and curriculum experts to improve the teaching and learning outcomes.

Utility of web content blocks in content extraction

Currently we are facing an overburdening growth of the number of reliable information sources on the Internet. The quantity of information available to everyone via Internet is dramatically growing each year [15]. At the same time, temporal and cognitive resources of human users are not changing, therefore causing a phenomenon of information overload. World Wide Web is one of the main sources of information for decision makers (reference to my research). However our studies show that, at least in Poland, the decision makers see some important problems when turning to Internet as a source of decision information. One of the most common obstacles raised is distribution of relevant information among many sources, and therefore need to visit different Web sources in order to collect all important content and analyze it. A few research groups have recently turned to the problem of information extraction from the Web [13]. The most effort so far has been directed toward collecting data from dispersed databases accessible via web pages (related to as data extraction or information extraction from the Web) and towards understanding natural language texts by means of fact, entity, and association recognition (related to as information extraction). Data extraction efforts show some interesting results, however proper integration of web databases is still beyond us. Information extraction field has been recently very successful in retrieving information from natural language texts, however it is still lacking abilities to understand more complex information, requiring use of common sense knowledge, discourse analysis and disambiguation techniques.

Designing a blended learning model for primary school language learning

In Finland, there is a desperate need for flexible, reliable and functional multi-e-learning settings for pupils aged 11-13. Southern Finland has several ongoing e-learning projects, but none that develop a multiple setting, with learning and teaching occurring between more than two schools. In 2006, internet connections were not broadband and data transfer was mainly audio data. Connections and technical problems occurred, which were an obstacle to multi-e-learning. Internet connections today enable web-based learning in major parts of
Lapland and by 2015, broadband will reach even the remotest villages up north. Therefore, it is important to research the possibilities of multi-e-learning and to build collaborative, learner-centred, versatile network models for primary school-aged pupils. The resulting model will facilitate distance learning to extend education to rural, sparsely populated areas, and it will give a model of using mobile devices in language portfolios. This will promote regional equality and prevent exclusion. Working with portfolios provides the opportunity to develop mobility from a pedagogical point of view. It is important to study the pros and cons of mobile devices in producing artefacts on portfolios in e-learning and language learning settings.
The current study represents a design-based research approach. The design research approach includes two important aspects concerning the current research: ‘a teacher as researcher’ aspect, which means there is the possibility to be strongly involved in developing processes and an obstacle-aspect, which means that problems while developing, are seen as a
promoter in evolving the designed model, as apposed to negative results.

Designing a blended learning model for primary school language learning

In Finland, there is a desperate need for flexible, reliable and functional multi-e-learning settings for pupils aged 11-13. Southern Finland has several ongoing e-learning projects, but none that develop a multiple setting, with learning and teaching occurring between more than two schools. In 2006, internet connections were not broadband and data transfer was mainly audio data. Connections and technical problems occurred, which were an obstacle to multi-e-learning. Internet connections today enable web-based learning in major parts of Lapland and by 2015, broadband will reach even the remotest villages up north. Therefore, it is important to research the possibilities of multi-e-learning and to build collaborative, learner-centred, versatile network models for primary school-aged pupils. The resulting model will facilitate distance learning to extend education to rural, sparsely populated areas, and it will give a model of using mobile devices in language portfolios. This will promote regional equality and prevent exclusion. Working with portfolios provides the opportunity to develop mobility from a pedagogical point of view. It is important to study the pros and cons of mobile devices in producing artefacts on portfolios in e-learning and language learning settings. The current study represents a design-based research approach. The design research approach includes two important aspects concerning the current research: ‘a teacher as researcher’ aspect, which means there is the possibility to be strongly involved in developing processes and an obstacle-aspect, which means that problems while developing, are seen as a promoter in evolving the designed model, as apposed to negative results.

FIN-CLARIN: A Framework for Depositing and Disseminating Language Resources for R&D

Researchers and developers in academia and industry would benefit from a facility that enables them to easily locate, licence and use the kind of empirical data they need for testing and refining their hypotheses and to deposit and disseminate their data e.g. to support replication and validation of reported scientific experiments. To answer these needs initially in Finland, there is an ongoing project at University of Helsinki and its collaborators to create a user-friendly web service for researchers and developers in Finland and other countries. In our talk, we describe ongoing work to create a palette of extensive but easily available Finnish language resources and technologies for the research community, including lexical resources, wordnets, morphologically tagged corpora, dependency syntactic treebanks and parsebanks, open-source finite state toolkits and libraries and language models to support text analysis and processing at customer site. Also first publicly available results are presented.

A Brief Grammar of Euskara, the Basque Language

This is a short grammar of the Basque language, or Euskara as it is called by its speakers. What follows is a partial description of the syntax of Euskara. The text has been arranged in the following fashion: there is an index where you can find the distribution of topics. Within each of the topics, an effort has been made to arrange information from general to specific, so that as you read into a given section, you will get into more details about the topic being under discussion. This grammar hopes to be useful to a wide variety of users. Therefore, it will probably not satisfy anyone completely: Those who want a quick 'feel' for the language will be disappointed by the slow and messy details the text dives into. Those who want a detailed, professional description will be disappointed by the lack of depth in the discussion. The text hopes to sit somewhere in the middle, and if it tells too much to those who want to know a little, and too little to those who want to know a lot, then it will have done its job.

Web 2.0 e inglês como língua estrangeira: atitudes de professores e alunos adultos

O presente estudo tem por objetivos compilar e analisar percepções sobre o uso de ferramentas web 2.0 no ensino de inglês como língua estrangeira e aliar a análise de atitudes à teoria da Andragogia, que trata do aprendizado de adultos, proposta por Knowles (1973, 1975, 1984, 1990). O assunto parece não contar com estudos coordenados, visto que Thomas (2010) apenas muito recentemente editou um compêndio com trabalhos envolvendo as possíveis aplicações de recursos da web 2.0 no estudo de uma língua estrangeira e as percepções de alunos, embora outros estudos, como os de Rosell-Aguilar (2004), Conole (2008), Kárpáti (2009) e Jarvis e Szymczyk (2010) tenham discutido o assunto isoladamente. Neste trabalho é realizada a compilação das opiniões de alunos adultos e de professores de inglês como língua estrangeira. Como instrumento de coleta de dados optou-se pela utilização de questionários fechados. Tal abordagem possivelmente dá a esta pesquisa um caráter inédito, ao menos no que se refere à coleta de atitudes de alunos adultos e professores brasileiros de um curso de idiomas quanto ao uso de ferramentas web 2.0 no ensino de uma língua estrangeira. A análise dos dados mostrou que aprendizes adultos e professores têm atitudes positivas e estão preparados para a utilização de recursos web 2.0 em sala de aula. Conclui-se, entretanto, que embora a maioria dos participantes desta pesquisa concorde que o uso de tais ferramentas contribui para o ensino de inglês como língua estrangeira, alguns ajustes e procedimentos ainda devem ser implementados para que as ferramentas web 2.0 se tornem não apenas um acessório, mas parte integrante do processo de aquisição do idioma

Ontologia de notícias: um modelo para classificação do conteúdo dos jornais on-line brasileiros, segundo a lógica da Web Semântica

Este trabalho tem por objetivo propor um modelo de ontologia simples e generalista, capaz de descrever os conceitos mais básicos que permeiam o domínio de conhecimento dos jornais on-line brasileiros não especializados, fundamentado tanto na prática quanto conceitualmente, em conformidade com os princípios da Web Semântica. A partir de uma nova forma de classificação e organização do conteúdo, a ontologia proposta deve ter condições de atender as necessidades comuns de ambas as partes, jornal e leitor, que são, resumidamente, a busca e a recuperação das informações.

Diseño e implementación de una herramienta web para el análisis y ayuda para la toma de decisiones de tecnologías de acceso.

[EN]Nowadays the use of web applications is a routine not only for companies but also for anyone interested in them. Thus, this market has risen hugely since the introduction of The Internet in our daily lives. Everyone has experienced the moment when you have to choose an access service and you do not know which one to select. At that moment, it is when this web application comes into action. It provides a useful interface in order to choose between access services as well as an analysis tool for the different access technologies in the market. Written in Java language, this web application is as simple as it can be, offering a complete interface that meets the needs of everyone, from the people at home to the largest company.

A Rede Enraizados e o Movimento Hip Hop: ritornelos territoriais e o desenvolvimento da rádio web

O hip hop é um movimento político, social e cultural presente nas periferias do Brasil desde 1980. O hip hop vem se desenvolvendo ao longo dos anos, criando espaço, ganhando visibilidade e ampliando o seu público, principalmente entre os segmentos das juventudes urbanas. O presente trabalho teve como objetivo principal investigar o Movimento Enraizados, uma organização hip hop da Baixada Fluminense, que articula e interage com parceiros em diversos estados e alguns países. Nesse contexto, o estudo selecionou três questões como eixos para a análise. Como foi criada a Rede Enraizados e quais são suas principais características? Como o Movimento Enraizados produz territórios existenciais na Baixada Fluminense? Como o Movimento Enraizados utiliza a linguagem radiofônica para expressar suas ações? Para a análise das questões levantadas, a pesquisa utilizou o referencial teórico de Antonio Negri e Deleuze & Guattari, costurando os conceitos de comum, multidão, rádios livres, ritornelos, territórios. A sede do Movimento Enraizados, em Morro Agudo / Nova Iguaçu, é o centro Rede Enraizados e responsável pela dinamização das informações em seus diversos canais de comunicação. Ao disparar seus projetos e iniciativas na construção de uma rede intercontinental de apoio-mútuo, o Movimento Enraizados desterritorializa sentidos e práticas da Baixada Fluminense. Essa desterritorialização produz uma mensagem potente de militância cultural para jovens e fortalece redes para a construção de novas resistências biopolíticas nesses territórios.

Performance assessment of XACML authorizations for supply chain traceability web services

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services (WS) offer advanced flexibility and interoperability capabilities. However they imply significant performance overheads that need to be carefully considered. Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Traceability systems are an interesting domain for the use of WS technologies that are usually deemed to be too complex and unnecessary in practical applications, especially regarding security. This paper presents an externalized security architecture that uses the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) authorization standard to enforce visibility restrictions on trace-ability data in a supply chain where multiple companies collaborate; the performance overheads are assessed by comparing 'raw' authorization implementations - Access Control Lists, Tokens, and RDF Assertions - with their XACML-equivalents. © 2012 IEEE.