Abstract
The methods used to produce news rankings by recommender systems are not public and it is unclear if they reflect the real importance assigned by readers. We address the task of trying to forecast the number of times a news item will be tweeted, as a proxy for the importance assigned by its readers. We focus on methods for accurately forecasting which news will have a high number of tweets as these are the key for accurate recommendations. This type of news is rare and this creates difficulties to standard prediction methods. Recent research has shown that most models will fail on tasks where the goal is accuracy on a small sub-set of rare values of the target variable. In order to overcome this, resampling approaches with several methods for handling imbalanced regression tasks were tested in our domain. This paper describes and discusses the results of these experimental comparisons.

Abstract
Due to its historical nature, data warehouses require that large volumes of data need to be stored in their repositories. Some organizations are beginning to have problems to manage and analyze these huge volumes of data. This is due, in large part, to the relational databases which are the primary method of data storage in a data warehouse, and start underperforming, crumbling under the weight of the data stored. In opposition to these systems, arise the NoSQL databases that are associated with the storage of very large volumes of data inherent to the Big Data paradigm. Thus, this article focuses on the study of the feasibility and the implications of the adoption of a NoSQL database, within the data warehousing context. MongoDB was selected to represent the NoSQL systems in this investigation. In this paper will be explained the processes required to design the structure of a data warehouse and typically dimensional queries in the MongoDB system. The undertaken research culminates in the performance analysis of queries executed in a traditional data warehouse, based on the SQL Server system, and an equivalent data warehouse based on the MongoDB system.

Abstract
Assessment plays a central role in any educational process as a way of evaluating the students' knowledge on the concepts associated with learning objectives. The assessment of free-text answers is a process that, besides being very costly in terms of time spent by teachers, may lead to inequities due to the difficulty in applying the same evaluation criteria to all answers. This paper describes a system composed by several modules whose main goal is to work as a formative assessment tool for students and to help teachers creating and assessing exams as well monitoring students' progress. The system automatically creates training exams for students to practice based on questions from previous exams and assists teachers in the creation of evaluation exams with various kinds of information about students' performance. The system automatically assesses training exams to give automatic feedback to students. The correction of free-text answers is based on the syntactic and semantic similarity between the student answers and various reference answers, thus going beyond the simple lexical matching. For this, several pre-processing tasks are performed in order to reduce each answer to its more manageable canonical form. Besides the syntactic and semantic similarity between answers, the way the teacher evaluates the answers is also acquired. To accomplish that, the assessment is done using sub scores defined by the teacher concerning parts of the answer or its subgoals. The system has been trained and tested on exams manually graded by History teachers. There is a good correlation between the evaluation of the instructors and the evaluation performed by our system.