Large global financial imbalances need not be the harbinger of a world financial crash as many authors believe. Instead, we show that large and persistent global imbalances can be the outcome of financial integration when countries have different financial markets characteristics. In particular, countries with more advanced financial markets accumulate foreign liabilities vis-a-vis countries wi...

This paper documents patterns in international trade costs in processed foods for a large cross-section of developing and developed countries, during the 1976-2000 period. A trade costs index is inferred from a micro-founded gravity equation that incorporates bilateral ‘iceberg’ trade costs. For 2000, the weighted average tariff equivalent of trade costs ranges from 73% for the North to 134% fo...

This paper regards the query keywords selection problem in source retrieval as learning a ranking model to choose the method of keywords extraction over suspicious document segments. Four basic methods are used in our ranking function: BM25, TFIDF, TF and EW. Then, a ranking model based on Ranking SVM is proposed to rank the query keywords group which is contributed to get the higher evaluation...

The paper presents a measurement framework for assessing the eGovernance maturity level of countries through the analysis of municipal websites. The paper also introduces the results of a survey carried out to apply and validate the framework. Applied to municipal websites of different countries, the framework considers websites content and design. For each country, the sample included three we...

Text readability is typically defined in terms of “grade level”; the expected educational level of the reader at which the text is directed. Mechanisms for measuring readability in English documents are well established; however this is not in case in many other languages, such as syllabic alphabetic languages. In this paper seven different mechanisms for assessing the readability of syllabic a...

Aggregate ranking tasks are those where documents are not the final ranking outcome, but instead an intermediary component. For instance, in expert search, a ranking of candidate persons with relevant expertise to a query is generated after consideration of a document ranking. Many models exist for aggregate ranking tasks, however obtaining an effective and robust setting for different aggregat...

This paper provides an overview of the NTCIR-10 INTENT-2 task (the second INTENT task), which comprises the Subtopic Mining and the Document Ranking subtasks. INTENT-2 attracted participating teams from China, France, Japan and South Korea – 12 teams for Subtopic Mining and 4 teams for Document Ranking (including an organisers’ team). The Subtopic Mining subtask received 34 English runs, 23 Chi...

In a generic group decision scenario, the decision makers review alternatives and then provide their own individual ranking. The aggregate ranking problem is to obtain a ranking that is fair and representative of the individual rankings. We argue here that using cardinal pairwise comparisons provides several advantages over score-wise models. The aggregate group ranking problem is then formaliz...

In a generic group decision scenario, the decision makers review alternatives and then provide their own individual ranking. The aggregate ranking problem is to obtain a ranking that is fair and representative of the individual rankings. We argue here that using cardinal pairwise comparisons provides several advantages over scorewise models. The aggregate group ranking problem is then formalize...