State-of-the-art Question Answering (QA) systems are very sensitive to variations in the phrasing of an information need. Finding the preferred language for such a need is a valuable task. We investigate that claim by adopting a simple MTbased paraphrasing technique and evaluating QA system performance on paraphrased questions. We found a potential increase of 35% in MRR with respect to the ori...

In the field of personalized systems big role is granted to the adaptive elearning environments. The task of these systems is very important and complicated. With their participation the learner gains exactly the knowledge he needs most, and the system adapts to user needs, expectations and his individual features. In this kind of systems information about learner is saved in the learner model ...

Human–information interaction (HII) for simple information and for complex information is different because people’s goals and information needs differ between the two cases. With complex information, comprehension comes from understanding the relationships and interactions within the information and factors outside of a design team’s control. Yet, a design team must consider all these within a...

There is a wealth of knowledge linking Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to human development, but Africa’s leaders have not used it well to develop its human capital. The continent has the lowest global levels of ICT diffusion and human development. This paper proposes a way of developing Africa’s vital access to knowledge through ICT, by reviewing and using the human developm...

s for tracking resources. To begin with, chaining is a significant seeking activity in art historical research and it is usually carried out through, for example, books, articles, Digital Infrastructure for Art Historical Research: thinking about user needs Christina Kamposiori 249 bibliographic catalogues, references and footnotes. Brilliant (1988) described effectively this activity in

An automatic mechanism that gives verbal navigation instructions to pedestrians in situ needs to take into account a number of factors. Besides giving the instruction at the right time and place, the information needs to be as unambiguous as possible for the user to both choose the correct path and be confident in doing so. Humans make extensive use of landmarks when describing the way to other...

Word importance discrimination is a task deserving attention when one treats a topic from TREC where a topic is quite long. The goal of the process is to estimate importance of words which carry any (additional) information about user information needs. In our experiments we estimated word importance using context information of a word.

Documents ojlen display a structure determined by the author, e.g., several chapters, each with several sub-chapters and so on. Taking into account the structure of a document allows the retrieval process to focus on those parts of the documents that are most relevant to an information need. Chiaramella et al advanced a model for indexing and retrieving structured documents. Their aim was to ex...

This paper focuses on the information needs and behaviours of senior citizens and their carers in the community. Two case studies concerning elderly stroke patients and their carers are described and discussed. Analysis of the case study data reveals a number of themes including the actual information needs and information behaviours of the senior citizens, the importance of proxy information s...