Query rewriting in information retrieval: automatic context extraction from local user documents to improve query results

The central objective of research in Information Retrieval (IR) is to discover new techniques to retrieve relevant information in order to satisfy an Information Need. The Information Need is satisfied when relevant information can be provided to the user. In IR, relevance is a fundamental concept which has changed over time, from popular to personal, i.e., what was considered relevant before was information for the whole population, but what is considered relevant now is specific information for each user. Hence, there is a need to connect the behavior of the system to the condition of a particular person and his social context; thereby an interdisciplinary sector called Human-Centered Computing was born. For the modern search engine, the information extracted for the individual user is crucial. According to the Personalized Search (PS), two different techniques are necessary to personalize a search: contextualization (interconnected conditions that occur in an activity), and individualization (characteristics that distinguish an individual). This movement of focus to the individual's need undermines the rigid linearity of the classical model overtaken the ``berry picking'' model which explains that the terms change thanks to the informational feedback received from the search activity introducing the concept of evolution of search terms. The development of Information Foraging theory, which observed the correlations between animal foraging and human information foraging, also contributed to this transformation through attempts to optimize the cost-benefit ratio. This thesis arose from the need to satisfy human individuality when searching for information, and it develops a synergistic collaboration between the frontiers of technological innovation and the recent advances in IR. The search method developed exploits what is relevant for the user by changing radically the way in which an Information Need is expressed, because now it is expressed through the generation of the query and its own context. As a matter of fact the method was born under the pretense to improve the quality of search by rewriting the query based on the contexts automatically generated from a local knowledge base. Furthermore, the idea of optimizing each IR system has led to develop it as a middleware of interaction between the user and the IR system. Thereby the system has just two possible actions: rewriting the query, and reordering the result. Equivalent actions to the approach was described from the PS that generally exploits information derived from analysis of user behavior, while the proposed approach exploits knowledge provided by the user. The thesis went further to generate a novel method for an assessment procedure, according to the "Cranfield paradigm", in order to evaluate this type of IR systems. The results achieved are interesting considering both the effectiveness achieved and the innovative approach undertaken together with the several applications inspired using a local knowledge base.

Challenging Folk Icons - Rewriting Woody and Santeri

Woody Guthrie’s song, “The 1913 Massacre,” written around 1940-41, has become something of a folk anthem for progressives, leftists, and labor supporters. It depicts the Italian Hall Disaster of December 24, 1913, in a plainspoken and colorful way, but has been (rightfully) described as “deeply flawed historically.” Much like Guthrie’s English-language folk songs, Finnish immigrant Santeri Mäkelä had a major impact on capturing the working-world around him. Mäkelä’s lyrics for the “Kaivantomiehen Laulu (The Miners’ Song)” were first published in Hancock, 1909, in “Uusi Työväen Laulukirja (The New Workers’ Songbook),” and was probably sung widely by Finnish strikers during the 1913-14 Michigan Copper Strike. Leading up to, and during this Strike Centennial year, there have been renewed performances of the song, both in Finland and the United States—but only in the original Finnish language. This presentation will delve into the accuracy, history, and lyrics of these two important, but historically problematic labor songs.

Rewriting the history of the tyrannicides : Thucydides versus Herodotus?

Este trabajo trata sobre la famosa digresión de Tucídides en el libro sexto de su historia acerca de la caída de la tiranía en Atenas (Tuc. 6.54-59) y su relación con el relato de Heródoto. La digresión de Tucídides (y más específicamente su tono polémico) ha provocado controversia entre los comentadores, que han analizado a fondo las narrativas de los dos historiadores tanto desde una perspectiva histórica como historiográfica. Este estudio tiende a contribuir a esta discusión a través de tres sugerencias: la primera, Tucídides se mete no solo con la pequeña sección sobre los tiranicidas de la Historia de Heródoto (esto es Hdt. 5.55-65), sino, más bien, con toda la narrativa de la Historia de Heródoto sobre la liberación de Atenas de la tiranía que se extiende hasta el discurso de Socles (esto es Hdt. 5.55-5.96.2); segunda, las correcciones de Tucídides al relato de Heródoto son menores, tercera, dado que las divergencias de Tucídides con respecto a Heródoto no son decisivas para la versión correcta de los hechos, el tono polémico de Tucídides en su digresión resulta todavía más difícil de explicar. En este trabajo se sugiere tentativamente que la actitud polémica de Tucídides tiene más sentido si es interpretada en el contexto de la rivalidad del historiador con Heródoto