Detection of events and actions in video entails substantial processing of very large, even open-ended, video streams. Video data present a unique challenge for the information retrieval community because properly representing video events is challenging. We propose a novel approach to analyze temporal aspects of video data. We consider video data…

One of the most critical steps to integrating heterogeneous e-Business applications using different XML schemas is schema matching, which is known to be costly and error-prone. Many automatic schema matching approaches have been proposed, but the challenge is still daunting because of the complexity of schemas and immaturity of technologies in…

Amid the rapid growth of information today is the increasing challenge for people to survive and navigate its magnitude. Dynamics and heterogeneity of large information spaces such as the Web challenge information retrieval in these environments. Collection of information in advance and centralization of IR operations are hardly possible because…

In the current millennium, extensive use of computers and the internet caused an exponential increase in information. Few research areas are as important as information extraction, which primarily involves extracting concepts and the relations between them from free text. Limitations in the size of training data, lack of lexicons and lack of…

Along with the greater productivity that CAD automation provides nowadays, the product data of engineering applications needs to be shared and managed efficiently to gain a competitive edge for the engineering product design. However, exchanging and sharing the heterogeneous product data is still challenging. This dissertation first presents a…

Coreference resolution (CR) and entity relation detection (ERD) aim at finding predefined relations between pairs of entities in text. CR focuses on resolving identity relations while ERD focuses on detecting non-identity relations. Both CR and ERD are important as they can potentially improve other natural language processing (NLP) related tasks…

PubMed® is an on-line literature database hosted by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Containing over 21 million citations for biomedical literature--both abstracts and full text--in the areas of the life sciences, behavioral studies, chemistry, and bioengineering, PubMed® represents an important tool for researchers. PubMed® searches return…

Geotechnical data are one of the most prevalent data types in civil engineering projects. The majority of the civil engineering projects that are in use today are designed using site-specific geotechnical data. The usage of geotechnical data is not limited to construction projects. This data is used in a wide range of applications, including…

The variety and complexity of potentially-related data resources available for querying--webpages, databases, data warehouses--has been growing ever more rapidly. There is a growing need to pose integrative queries "across" multiple such sources, exploiting foreign keys and other means of interlinking data to merge information from diverse…

Researchers that investigate the media's coverage of health have historically relied on keyword searches to retrieve relevant health news coverage, and manual content analysis methods to categorize and score health news text. These methods are problematic. Manual content analysis methods are labor intensive, time consuming, and inherently…

This dissertation explores the use of geometric and graphical models for a variety of information search and filtering applications. These models serve to provide an intuitive understanding of the problem domains and as well as computational efficiencies to our solution approaches. We begin by considering a search and rescue scenario where both…

One of the problems associated with automatic thesaurus construction is with determining the semantic relationship between word pairs. Quasi-synonyms provide a type of equivalence relationship: words are similar only for purposes of information retrieval. Determining such relationships in a thesaurus is hard to achieve automatically. The term…

This study investigates the relationships between the use of a zoom tool, the terms they supply to describe the image, and the type of image being viewed. Participants were assigned to two groups, one with access to the tool and one without, and were asked to supply terms to describe forty images, divided into four categories: landscape, portrait,…

An unprecedented amount of information encompassing almost every facet of human activities across the world is generated daily in the form of zeros and ones, and that is often the only form in which such information is recorded. A good fraction of this information needs to be preserved for periods of time ranging from a few years to centuries.…