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In dieser Arbeit wird das MobileFacets System präsentiert, dass ein bequemes facettiertes Browsen und Suchen von semantischen Daten auf einem mobilen Endgerät ermöglicht. Anwender bekommen in Abhängigkeit ihres lokalen Ortskontextes, weitreichende Informationen wie Orte, Personen, Organisationen oder Events dargeboten. Basierend auf der Theorie von Facetten, wird das facettierte Browsen zur Erkundung von strukturierten Datensätzen anhand einer Client Anwendung realisiert. Die Anwendung bedient sich dabei eines lokalen Servers, der für Anfragen der Clients, die Anbindung an externe Datenquellen und die Aufbereitung der strukturierten Daten zuständig ist.
This thesis presents novel approaches for integrating context information into probabilistic models. Data from social media is typically associated with metadata, which includes context information such as timestamps, geographical coordinates or links to user profiles. Previous studies showed the benefits of using such context information in probabilistic models, e.g.\ improved predictive performance. In practice, probabilistic models which account for context information still play a minor role in data analysis. There are multiple reasons for this. Existing probabilistic models often are complex, the implementation is difficult, implementations are not publicly available, or the parameter estimation is computationally too expensive for large datasets. Additionally, existing models are typically created for a specific type of content and context and lack the flexibility to be applied to other data.
This thesis addresses these problems by introducing a general approach for modelling multiple, arbitrary context variables in probabilistic models and by providing efficient inference schemes and implementations.
In the first half of this thesis, the importance of context and the potential of context information for probabilistic modelling is shown theoretically and in practical examples. In the second half, the example of topic models is employed for introducing a novel approach to context modelling based on document clusters and adjacency relations in the context space. They can cope with areas of sparse observations and These models allow for the first time the efficient, explicit modelling of arbitrary context variables including cyclic and spherical context (such as temporal cycles or geographical coordinates). Using the novel three-level hierarchical multi-Dirichlet process presented in this thesis, the adjacency of ontext clusters can be exploited and multiple contexts can be modelled and weighted at the same time. Efficient inference schemes are derived which yield interpretable model parameters that allow analyse the relation between observations and context.
Einfluss eines Ausrichtungswerkzeugs auf die Bedienbarkeit in unbeaufsichtigten Eyetrackingsystemen
(2015)
Eye gaze trackers are devices that can estimate the direction of gaze of a person. Among usability testing eye tracking also allows persons with decreased limb mobility to control or to interact with the computer. The quality and availability of eye tracking equipment has been increasing while costs have been decreasing. This development leads to entering new markets by using eye tracking as an additional input dimension for a variety of applications. Up to now eye tracking has been supervised by qualified experts, who assured that the important conditions like position in front of the eye tracking device, calibration and light conditions has been kept, while using.
This thesis examines an adjustment tool, which is helping the user to adjust in front of the eye tracker and helping to keep this position during the experiment. Furthermore the accuracy while moving the head has been analysed. In this experiment an remote eye gaze tracker has been used to control a game character in the video game called 'Schau Genau!'. The goal was to determine whether the game is playable without the barrier of adjusting and calibration. The results show that adjusting in front of an eye tracker is not a problem, keeping this position is. Small changes of the head position after the calibration process leads to a lack of accuracy. Giving up the calibration and using someone else calibration shows way bigger deviation. Additional head movement increases error rate and makes controlling more difficult.
Diese Studienarbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Entwicklung einer Extension für Mozilla Thunderbird, welche direkt in den Text einer Email eingebettete strukturierte Informationen (wie z.B. Termine, Kontaktdaten) automatisch erkennt und es dem Benutzer ermöglicht, diese in weiteren Anwendungen weiter zu verwenden. Es werden Überlegungen zur Usability und möglichen weiteren Entwicklungen vorgestellt, sowie der Code des Prototyp genauer aufgezeigt.
The Web is an essential component of moving our society to the digital age. We use it for communication, shopping, and doing our work. Most user interaction in the Web happens with Web page interfaces. Thus, the usability and accessibility of Web page interfaces are relevant areas of research to make the Web more useful. Eye tracking is a tool that can be helpful in both areas, performing usability testing and improving accessibility. It can be used to understand users' attention on Web pages and to support usability experts in their decision-making process. Moreover, eye tracking can be used as an input method to control an interface. This is especially useful for people with motor impairment, who cannot use traditional input devices like mouse and keyboard. However, interfaces on Web pages become more and more complex due to dynamics, i.e., changing contents like animated menus and photo carousels. We need general approaches to comprehend dynamics on Web pages, allowing for efficient usability analysis and enjoyable interaction with eye tracking. In the first part of this thesis, we report our work on improving gaze-based analysis of dynamic Web pages. Eye tracking can be used to collect the gaze signals of users, who browse a Web site and its pages. The gaze signals show a usability expert what parts in the Web page interface have been read, glanced at, or skipped. The aggregation of gaze signals allows a usability expert insight into the users' attention on a high-level, before looking into individual behavior. For this, all gaze signals must be aligned to the interface as experienced by the users. However, the user experience is heavily influenced by changing contents, as these may cover a substantial portion of the screen. We delineate unique states in Web page interfaces including changing contents, such that gaze signals from multiple users can be aggregated correctly. In the second part of this thesis, we report our work on improving the gaze-based interaction with dynamic Web pages. Eye tracking can be used to retrieve gaze signals while a user operates a computer. The gaze signals may be interpreted as input controlling an interface. Nowadays, eye tracking as an input method is mostly used to emulate mouse and keyboard functionality, hindering an enjoyable user experience. There exist a few Web browser prototypes that directly interpret gaze signals for control, but they do not work on dynamic Web pages. We have developed a method to extract interaction elements like hyperlinks and text inputs efficiently on Web pages, including changing contents. We adapt the interaction with those elements for eye tracking as the input method, such that a user can conveniently browse the Web hands-free. Both parts of this thesis conclude with user-centered evaluations of our methods, assessing the improvements in the user experience for usability experts and people with motor impairment, respectively.
Commonsense reasoning can be seen as a process of identifying dependencies amongst events and actions. Understanding the circumstances surrounding these events requires background knowledge with sufficient breadth to cover a wide variety of domains. In the recent decades, there has been a lot of work in extracting commonsense knowledge, a number of these projects provide their collected data as semantic networks such as ConceptNet and CausalNet. In this thesis, we attempt to undertake the Choice Of Plausible Alternatives (COPA) challenge, a problem set with 1000 questions written in multiple-choice format with a premise and two alternative choices for each question. Our approach differs from previous work by using shortest paths between concepts in a causal graph with the edge weight as causality metric. We use CausalNet as primary network and implement a few design choices to explore the strengths and drawbacks of this approach, and propose an extension using ConceptNet by leveraging its commonsense knowledge base.
Cicero ist eine asynchrone Diskussionsplattform, die im Rahmen der Arbeitsgruppe Informationssysteme und Semantic Web (ISWeb) der Universität Koblenz-Landau entwickelt wurde. Die webbasierte Anwendung folgt dem Gedanken eines semantischen Wikis und soll insbesondere beim Arbeitsablauf von Entwurfsprozessen eingesetzt werden. Dabei verwendet Cicero ein restriktives Argumentationsmodell, das einerseits strukturierte Diskussionen von schwierigen Prozessen fördert und andererseits den Entscheidungsfindungsprozess unterstützt. Im Zentrum der Arbeit steht die Evaluation von Cicero, wobei im vorhergehenden theoretischen Teil die Hintergründe und Funktionsweisen vorgestellt werden und im nachfolgenden praktischen Teil die Anwendung anhand einer Fallstudie evaluiert wird. Die Studie wurde im Rahmen der Übungsveranstaltung zu Grundlagen der Datenbanken der Universität Koblenz im Wintersemester 2008/2009 durchgeführt , und die Studenten hatten die Aufgabe, einen Entwurfsprozess mit Hilfe von Cicero zu diskutieren. Über die erhobenen Daten der Fallstudie wird ein Akzeptanztest durchgeführt. Hierbei wird überprüft, ob die Benutzer Cicero positiv annehmen und die Methodik richtig anwenden. Denn aufgrund des vorgegebenen Argumentationsmodells müssen die Benutzer ihr Kommunikationsverhalten ändern und ihren herkömmlichen Diskussionsstil der Anwendung anpassen. Ziel der Evaluation ist es, kritische Erfolgsfaktoren im Umgang mit Cicero ausfindig zu machen. Anhand der identifizierten Schwachstellen werden abschließend gezielte Maßnahmen vorgeschlagen, die die Akzeptanz der Benutzer gegenüber Cicero erhöhen könnten.
The semantic web and model-driven engineering are changing the enterprise computing paradigm. By introducing technologies like ontologies, metadata and logic, the semantic web improves drastically how companies manage knowledge. In counterpart, model-driven engineering relies on the principle of using models to provide abstraction, enabling developers to concentrate on the system functionality rather than on technical platforms. The next enterprise computing era will rely on the synergy between both technologies. On the one side, ontology technologies organize system knowledge in conceptual domains according to its meaning. It addresses enterprise computing needs by identifying, abstracting and rationalizing commonalities, and checking for inconsistencies across system specifications. On the other side, model-driven engineering is closing the gap among business requirements, designs and executables by using domain-specific languages with custom-built syntax and semantics. In this scenario, the research question that arises is: What are the scientific and technical results around ontology technologies that can be used in model-driven engineering and vice versa? The objective is to analyze approaches available in the literature that involve both ontologies and model-driven engineering. Therefore, we conduct a literature review that resulted in a feature model for classifying state-of-the-art approaches. The results show that the usage of ontologies and model-driven engineering together have multiple purposes: validation, visual notation, expressiveness and interoperability. While approaches involving both paradigms exist, an integrated approach for UML class-based modeling and ontology modeling is lacking so far. Therefore, we investigate the techniques and languages for designing integrated models. The objective is to provide an approach to support the design of integrated solutions. Thus, we develop a conceptual framework involving the structure and the notations of a solution to represent and query software artifacts using a combination of ontologies and class-based modeling. As proof of concept, we have implemented our approach as a set of open source plug-ins -- the TwoUse Toolkit. The hypothesis is that a combination of both paradigms yields improvements in both fields, ontology engineering and model-driven engineering. For MDE, we investigate the impact of using features of the Web Ontology Language in software modeling. The results are patterns and guidelines for designing ontology-based information systems and for supporting software engineers in modeling software. The results include alternative ways of describing classes and objects and querying software models and metamodels. Applications show improvements on changeability and extensibility. In the ontology engineering domain, we investigate the application of techniques used in model-driven engineering to fill the abstraction gap between ontology specification languages and programming languages. The objective is to provide a model-driven platform for supporting activities in the ontology engineering life cycle. Therefore, we study the development of core ontologies in our department, namely the core ontology for multimedia (COMM) and the multimedia metadata ontology. The results are domain-specific languages that allow ontology engineers to abstract from implementation issues and concentrate on the ontology engineering task. It results in increasing productivity by filling the gap between domain models and source code.
Through the increasing availability of access to the web, more and more interactions between people take place in online social networks, such as Twitter or Facebook, or sites where opinions can be exchanged. At the same time, knowledge is made openly available for many people, such as by the biggest collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia and diverse information in Internet forums and on websites. These two kinds of networks - social networks and knowledge networks - are highly dynamic in the sense that the links that contain the important information about the relationships between people or the relations between knowledge items are frequently updated or changed. These changes follow particular structural patterns and characteristics that are far less random than expected.
The goal of this thesis is to predict three characteristic link patterns for the two network types of interest: the addition of new links, the removal of existing links and the presence of latent negative links. First, we show that the prediction of link removal is indeed a new and challenging problem. Even if the sociological literature suggests that reasons for the formation and resolution of ties are often complementary, we show that the two respective prediction problems are not. In particular, we show that the dynamics of new links and unlinks lead to the four link states of growth, decay, stability and instability. For knowledge networks we show that the prediction of link changes greatly benefits from the usage of temporal information; the timestamp of link creation and deletion events improves the prediction of future link changes. For that, we present and evaluate four temporal models that resemble different exploitation strategies. Focusing on directed social networks, we conceptualize and evaluate sociological constructs that explain the formation and dissolution of relationships between users. Measures based on information about past relationships are extremely valuable for predicting the dissolution of social ties. Hence, consistent for knowledge networks and social networks, temporal information in a network greatly improves the prediction quality. Turning again to social networks, we show that negative relationship information such as distrust or enmity can be predicted from positive known relationships in the network. This is particularly interesting in networks where users cannot label their relationships to other users as negative. For this scenario we show how latent negative relationships can be predicted.
“Did I say something wrong?” A word-level analysis of Wikipedia articles for deletion discussions
(2016)
This thesis focuses on gaining linguistic insights into textual discussions on a word level. It was of special interest to distinguish messages that constructively contribute to a discussion from those that are detrimental to them. Thereby, we wanted to determine whether “I”- and “You”-messages are indicators for either of the two discussion styles. These messages are nowadays often used in guidelines for successful communication. Although their effects have been successfully evaluated multiple times, a large-scale analysis has never been conducted. Thus, we used Wikipedia Articles for Deletion (short: AfD) discussions together with the records of blocked users and developed a fully automated creation of an annotated data set. In this data set, messages were labelled either constructive or disruptive. We applied binary classifiers to the data to determine characteristic words for both discussion styles. Thereby, we also investigated whether function words like pronouns and conjunctions play an important role in distinguishing the two. We found that “You”-messages were a strong indicator for disruptive messages which matches their attributed effects on communication. However, we found “I”-messages to be indicative for disruptive messages as well which is contrary to their attributed effects. The importance of function words could neither be confirmed nor refuted. Other characteristic words for either communication style were not found. Yet, the results suggest that a different model might represent disruptive and constructive messages in textual discussions better.