Advanced Metasearch Engine Technology
Advanced Metasearch Engine Technology

Author: Weiyi Meng

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 117

ISBN-13: 3031018435

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Among the search tools currently on the Web, search engines are the most well known thanks to the popularity of major search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. While extremely successful, these major search engines do have serious limitations. This book introduces large-scale metasearch engine technology, which has the potential to overcome the limitations of the major search engines. Essentially, a metasearch engine is a search system that supports unified access to multiple existing search engines by passing the queries it receives to its component search engines and aggregating the returned results into a single ranked list. A large-scale metasearch engine has thousands or more component search engines. While metasearch engines were initially motivated by their ability to combine the search coverage of multiple search engines, there are also other benefits such as the potential to obtain better and fresher results and to reach the Deep Web. The following major components of large-scale metasearch engines will be discussed in detail in this book: search engine selection, search engine incorporation, and result merging. Highly scalable and automated solutions for these components are emphasized. The authors make a strong case for the viability of the large-scale metasearch engine technology as a competitive technology for Web search. Table of Contents: Introduction / Metasearch Engine Architecture / Search Engine Selection / Search Engine Incorporation / Result Merging / Summary and Future Research

Advanced Metasearch Engine Technology
Advanced Metasearch Engine Technology

Author: Weiyi Meng

Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 1608451925

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Among the search tools currently on the Web, search engines are the most well known thanks to the popularity of major search engines such as Google and Yahoo . While extremely successful, these major search engines do have serious limitations. This book introduces large-scale metasearch engine technology, which has the potential to overcome the limitations of the major search engines. Essentially, a metasearch engine is a search system that supports unified access to multiple existing search engines by passing the queries it receives to its component search engines and aggregating the returned results into a single ranked list. A large-scale metasearch engine has thousands or more component search engines. While metasearch engines were initially motivated by their ability to combine the search coverage of multiple search engines, there are also other benefits such as the potential to obtain better and fresher results and to reach the Deep Web. The following major components of large-scale metasearch engines will be discussed in detail in this book: search engine selection, search engine incorporation, and result merging. Highly scalable and automated solutions for these components are emphasized. The authors make a strong case for the viability of the large-scale metasearch engine technology as a competitive technology for Web search. Table of Contents: Introduction / Metasearch Engine Architecture / Search Engine Selection / Search Engine Incorporation / Result Merging / Summary and Future Research

Peer-to-Peer Data Management
Peer-to-Peer Data Management

Author: Karl Aberer

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 3031018478

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This lecture introduces systematically into the problem of managing large data collections in peer-to-peer systems. Search over large datasets has always been a key problem in peer-to-peer systems and the peer-to-peer paradigm has incited novel directions in the field of data management. This resulted in many novel peer-to-peer data management concepts and algorithms, for supporting data management tasks in a wider sense, including data integration, document management and text retrieval. The lecture covers four different types of peer-to-peer data management systems that are characterized by the type of data they manage and the search capabilities they support. The first type are structured peer-to-peer data management systems which support structured query capabilities for standard data models. The second type are peer-to-peer data integration systems for querying of heterogeneous databases without requiring a common global schema. The third type are peer-to-peer document retrieval systems that enable document search based both on the textual content and the document structure. Finally, we introduce semantic overlay networks, which support similarity search on information represented in hierarchically organized and multi-dimensional semantic spaces. Topics that go beyond data representation and search are summarized at the end of the lecture. Table of Contents: Introduction / Structured Peer-to-Peer Databases / Peer-to-peer Data Integration / Peer-to-peer Retrieval / Semantic Overlay Networks / Conclusion

Methods for Mining and Summarizing Text Conversations
Methods for Mining and Summarizing Text Conversations

Author: Giuseppe Carenini​‌

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-06-01

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 303101880X

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Due to the Internet Revolution, human conversational data -- in written forms -- are accumulating at a phenomenal rate. At the same time, improvements in speech technology enable many spoken conversations to be transcribed. Individuals and organizations engage in email exchanges, face-to-face meetings, blogging, texting and other social media activities. The advances in natural language processing provide ample opportunities for these "informal documents" to be analyzed and mined, thus creating numerous new and valuable applications. This book presents a set of computational methods to extract information from conversational data, and to provide natural language summaries of the data. The book begins with an overview of basic concepts, such as the differences between extractive and abstractive summaries, and metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of summarization and various extraction tasks. It also describes some of the benchmark corpora used in the literature. The book introduces extraction and mining methods for performing subjectivity and sentiment detection, topic segmentation and modeling, and the extraction of conversational structure. It also describes frameworks for conducting dialogue act recognition, decision and action item detection, and extraction of thread structure. There is a specific focus on performing all these tasks on conversational data, such as meeting transcripts (which exemplify synchronous conversations) and emails (which exemplify asynchronous conversations). Very recent approaches to deal with blogs, discussion forums and microblogs (e.g., Twitter) are also discussed. The second half of this book focuses on natural language summarization of conversational data. It gives an overview of several extractive and abstractive summarizers developed for emails, meetings, blogs and forums. It also describes attempts for building multi-modal summarizers. Last but not least, the book concludes with thoughts on topics for further development. Table of Contents: Introduction / Background: Corpora and Evaluation Methods / Mining Text Conversations / Summarizing Text Conversations / Conclusions / Final Thoughts

Probabilistic Databases
Probabilistic Databases

Author: Dan Suciu

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 3031018796

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Probabilistic databases are databases where the value of some attributes or the presence of some records are uncertain and known only with some probability. Applications in many areas such as information extraction, RFID and scientific data management, data cleaning, data integration, and financial risk assessment produce large volumes of uncertain data, which are best modeled and processed by a probabilistic database. This book presents the state of the art in representation formalisms and query processing techniques for probabilistic data. It starts by discussing the basic principles for representing large probabilistic databases, by decomposing them into tuple-independent tables, block-independent-disjoint tables, or U-databases. Then it discusses two classes of techniques for query evaluation on probabilistic databases. In extensional query evaluation, the entire probabilistic inference can be pushed into the database engine and, therefore, processed as effectively as the evaluation of standard SQL queries. The relational queries that can be evaluated this way are called safe queries. In intensional query evaluation, the probabilistic inference is performed over a propositional formula called lineage expression: every relational query can be evaluated this way, but the data complexity dramatically depends on the query being evaluated, and can be #P-hard. The book also discusses some advanced topics in probabilistic data management such as top-k query processing, sequential probabilistic databases, indexing and materialized views, and Monte Carlo databases. Table of Contents: Overview / Data and Query Model / The Query Evaluation Problem / Extensional Query Evaluation / Intensional Query Evaluation / Advanced Techniques

Uncertain Schema Matching
Uncertain Schema Matching

Author: Avigdor Gal

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 85

ISBN-13: 3031018451

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Schema matching is the task of providing correspondences between concepts describing the meaning of data in various heterogeneous, distributed data sources. Schema matching is one of the basic operations required by the process of data and schema integration, and thus has a great effect on its outcomes, whether these involve targeted content delivery, view integration, database integration, query rewriting over heterogeneous sources, duplicate data elimination, or automatic streamlining of workflow activities that involve heterogeneous data sources. Although schema matching research has been ongoing for over 25 years, more recently a realization has emerged that schema matchers are inherently uncertain. Since 2003, work on the uncertainty in schema matching has picked up, along with research on uncertainty in other areas of data management. This lecture presents various aspects of uncertainty in schema matching within a single unified framework. We introduce basic formulations of uncertainty and provide several alternative representations of schema matching uncertainty. Then, we cover two common methods that have been proposed to deal with uncertainty in schema matching, namely ensembles, and top-K matchings, and analyze them in this context. We conclude with a set of real-world applications. Table of Contents: Introduction / Models of Uncertainty / Modeling Uncertain Schema Matching / Schema Matcher Ensembles / Top-K Schema Matchings / Applications / Conclusions and Future Work

On Uncertain Graphs
On Uncertain Graphs

Author: Arijit Khan

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 3031018605

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Large-scale, highly interconnected networks, which are often modeled as graphs, pervade both our society and the natural world around us. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is inherent in the underlying data due to a variety of reasons, such as noisy measurements, lack of precise information needs, inference and prediction models, or explicit manipulation, e.g., for privacy purposes. Therefore, uncertain, or probabilistic, graphs are increasingly used to represent noisy linked data in many emerging application scenarios, and they have recently become a hot topic in the database and data mining communities. Many classical algorithms such as reachability and shortest path queries become #P-complete and, thus, more expensive over uncertain graphs. Moreover, various complex queries and analytics are also emerging over uncertain networks, such as pattern matching, information diffusion, and influence maximization queries. In this book, we discuss the sources of uncertain graphs and their applications, uncertainty modeling, as well as the complexities and algorithmic advances on uncertain graphs processing in the context of both classical and emerging graph queries and analytics. We emphasize the current challenges and highlight some future research directions.

Query Processing over Incomplete Databases
Query Processing over Incomplete Databases

Author: Yunjun Gao

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-06-01

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 303101863X

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Incomplete data is part of life and almost all areas of scientific studies. Users tend to skip certain fields when they fill out online forms; participants choose to ignore sensitive questions on surveys; sensors fail, resulting in the loss of certain readings; publicly viewable satellite map services have missing data in many mobile applications; and in privacy-preserving applications, the data is incomplete deliberately in order to preserve the sensitivity of some attribute values. Query processing is a fundamental problem in computer science, and is useful in a variety of applications. In this book, we mostly focus on the query processing over incomplete databases, which involves finding a set of qualified objects from a specified incomplete dataset in order to support a wide spectrum of real-life applications. We first elaborate the three general kinds of methods of handling incomplete data, including (i) discarding the data with missing values, (ii) imputation for the missing values, and (iii) just depending on the observed data values. For the third method type, we introduce the semantics of k-nearest neighbor (kNN) search, skyline query, and top-k dominating query on incomplete data, respectively. In terms of the three representative queries over incomplete data, we investigate some advanced techniques to process incomplete data queries, including indexing, pruning as well as crowdsourcing techniques.

Similarity Joins in Relational Database Systems
Similarity Joins in Relational Database Systems

Author: Nikolaus Augsten

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 3031018516

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State-of-the-art database systems manage and process a variety of complex objects, including strings and trees. For such objects equality comparisons are often not meaningful and must be replaced by similarity comparisons. This book describes the concepts and techniques to incorporate similarity into database systems. We start out by discussing the properties of strings and trees, and identify the edit distance as the de facto standard for comparing complex objects. Since the edit distance is computationally expensive, token-based distances have been introduced to speed up edit distance computations. The basic idea is to decompose complex objects into sets of tokens that can be compared efficiently. Token-based distances are used to compute an approximation of the edit distance and prune expensive edit distance calculations. A key observation when computing similarity joins is that many of the object pairs, for which the similarity is computed, are very different from each other. Filters exploit this property to improve the performance of similarity joins. A filter preprocesses the input data sets and produces a set of candidate pairs. The distance function is evaluated on the candidate pairs only. We describe the essential query processing techniques for filters based on lower and upper bounds. For token equality joins we describe prefix, size, positional and partitioning filters, which can be used to avoid the computation of small intersections that are not needed since the similarity would be too low.

Perspectives on Business Intelligence
Perspectives on Business Intelligence

Author: Raymond T. Ng

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 3031018486

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In the 1980s, traditional Business Intelligence (BI) systems focused on the delivery of reports that describe the state of business activities in the past, such as for questions like "How did our sales perform during the last quarter?" A decade later, there was a shift to more interactive content that presented how the business was performing at the present time, answering questions like "How are we doing right now?" Today the focus of BI users are looking into the future. "Given what I did before and how I am currently doing this quarter, how will I do next quarter?" Furthermore, fuelled by the demands of Big Data, BI systems are going through a time of incredible change. Predictive analytics, high volume data, unstructured data, social data, mobile, consumable analytics, and data visualization are all examples of demands and capabilities that have become critical within just the past few years, and are growing at an unprecedented pace. This book introduces research problems and solutions on various aspects central to next-generation BI systems. It begins with a chapter on an industry perspective on how BI has evolved, and discusses how game-changing trends have drastically reshaped the landscape of BI. One of the game changers is the shift toward the consumerization of BI tools. As a result, for BI tools to be successfully used by business users (rather than IT departments), the tools need a business model, rather than a data model. One chapter of the book surveys four different types of business modeling. However, even with the existence of a business model for users to express queries, the data that can meet the needs are still captured within a data model. The next chapter on vivification addresses the problem of closing the gap, which is often significant, between the business and the data models. Moreover, Big Data forces BI systems to integrate and consolidate multiple, and often wildly different, data sources. One chapter gives an overview of several integration architectures for dealing with the challenges that need to be overcome. While the book so far focuses on the usual structured relational data, the remaining chapters turn to unstructured data, an ever-increasing and important component of Big Data. One chapter on information extraction describes methods for dealing with the extraction of relations from free text and the web. Finally, BI users need tools to visualize and interpret new and complex types of information in a way that is compelling, intuitive, but accurate. The last chapter gives an overview of information visualization for decision support and text.