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Publications

Publications by LIAAD

2017

Interactive System for Reasoning about Document Age

Authors
Jatowt, A; Campos, R;

Publication
CIKM'17: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2017 ACM CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Abstract
Recently, many historical texts have become digitized and made accessible for search and browsing. Professionals who work with collections of such texts often need to verify the correctness of documents' key metadata-their creation dates. In this paper, we demonstrate an interactive system for estimating the age of documents. It may be useful not only for tagging a large number of undated documents, but also for verifying already known timestamps. In order to infer probable dates, we rely on a large scale lexical corpora, Google Books Ngrams. Besides estimating the document creation year, the system also outputs evidences to support age detection and reasoning process and allows testing different hypotheses about document's age.

2017

Detecting Seasonal Queries Using Time Series and Content Features

Authors
Mansouri, B; Zahedi, MS; Rahgozar, M; Campos, R;

Publication
ICTIR'17: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2017 ACM SIGIR INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE THEORY OF INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Abstract
Many user information needs are strongly influenced by time. Some of these intents are expressed by users in queries issued indistinctively over time. Others follow a seasonal pattern. Examples of the latter are the queries "Golden Globe Award", "September 11th" or "Halloween", which refer to seasonal events that occur or have occurred at a specific occasion and for which, people often search in a planned and cyclic manner. Understanding this seasonal behavior, may help search engines to provide better ranking approaches and to respond with temporally relevant results leading into user's satisfaction. Detecting the diverse types of seasonal queries is therefore a key step for any search engine looking to present accurate results. In this paper, we categorize web search queries by their seasonality into 4 different categories: Non-Seasonal (NS, e.g., "Secure passwords"), Seasonal-related to ongoing events (SOE, "Golden Globe Award"), Seasonal-related to historical events (SHE, e.g., "September 11th") and Seasonal-related to special days and traditions (SSD, e.g., "Halloween"). To classify a given query we extract both time series (using the document publish date) and content features from its relevant documents. A Random Forest classifier is then used to classify web queries by their seasonality. Our experimental results show that they can be categorized with high accuracy. © 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

2017

What catches the eye in class observation? Observers' perspectives in a multidisciplinary peer observation of teaching program

Authors
Torres, AC; Lopes, A; Valente, JMS; Mouraz, A;

Publication
TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract
Peer Observation of Teaching has raised a lot of interest as a device for quality enhancement of teaching. While much research has focused on its models, implementation schemes and feedback to the observed, little attention has been paid to what the observer actually sees and can learn from the observation. A multidisciplinary peer observation of teaching program is described, and its data is used to identify the pedagogical aspects to which lecturers pay more attention to when observing classes. The discussion addresses the valuable learning opportunities for observers provided by this program, as well as its usefulness in disseminating, sharing and clarifying quality teaching practices. The need for further research concerning teacher-student relationships and students' engagement is also suggested.

2017

Renegotiation of Electronic Brokerage Contracts

Authors
Cunha, R; Veloso, B; Malheiro, B;

Publication
RECENT ADVANCES IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGIES, VOL 2

Abstract
CloudAnchor is a multiagent e-commerce platform which offers brokerage and resource trading services to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers and consumers. The access to these services requires the prior negotiation of Service Level Agreements (SLA) between the parties. In particular, the brokerage SLA (bSLA), which is mandatory for a business to have access to the platform, specifies the brokerage fee the business will pay every time it successfully trades a resource within the platform. However, while the negotiation of the resource SLA (rSLA) includes the uptime of the service, the brokerage SLA was negotiated for an unspecified time span. Since the commercial relationship defined through the bSLA - between a business and the platform can be long lasting, it is essential for businesses to be able to renegotiate the bSLA terms, i.e., renegotiate the brokerage fee. To address this issue, we designed a bSLA renegotiation mechanism, which takes into account the duration of the bSLA as well as the past behaviour (trust) and success (transactions) of the business in the CloudAnchor platform. The results show that the implemented bSLA renegotiation mechanism privileges, first, the most reliable businesses, and, then, those with higher volume of transactions, ensuring that the most reliable businesses get the best brokerage fees and resource prices. The proposed renegotiation mechanism promotes the fulfilment of SLA by all parties and increases the satisfaction of the trustworthy businesses in the CloudAnchor platform.

2017

Personalised fading for stream data

Authors
Veloso, B; Malheiro, B; Burguillo, JC; Foss, JD;

Publication
Proceedings of the Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2017, Marrakech, Morocco, April 3-7, 2017

Abstract
This paper describes a forgetting technique for the live update of viewer profiles based on individual sliding windows, fading and incremental matrix factorization. The individual sliding window maintains, for each viewer, a queue holding the last n viewer ratings. As new viewer events occur, they are inserted in the viewer queue, by shifting and fading the queue ratings, and the viewer latent model is faded. We explored time, rating-and-position and popularity-based fading techniques, using the latter as the base fading algorithm. This approach attempts to address the problem of dynamic viewer profile updating (volatile preferences) as well as the problem of bounded processing resources (fixed size queues). The results show that our approach outperforms previous approaches, improving the quality of the predictions.

2017

Justifying CEO Pay Ratios: Analysing Corporate Responses to Bloomberg’s Listing of Standard & Poor’s 500 Pay Ratios

Authors
Branco M.C.; Delgado C.;

Publication
CSR, Sustainability, Ethics and Governance

Abstract
This study analyzes Standard & Poor’s 500 Index top 250 companies’ responses to Bloomberg’s disclosed calculations of CEO pay ratios. The results suggest that CEO pay ratios, CEO compensations and average worker compensations do not seem to be related to the decision to respond. They also indicate that many of the corporations have adopted a strategy of avoiding the issue or deflecting attention from it by either choosing not to respond or criticizing the technicalities of the calculation of the CEO pay ratios. Corporations that responded largely conceptualize and communicate the rationale for high executive compensation in performance-driven language.

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