This paper presents Natjam, a system that supports arbitrary job priorities, hard real-time scheduling, and efficient preemption for Mapreduce clusters that are resource-constrained. Our contributions include: i) smart eviction policies for jobs and for tasks, based on resource usage, task runtime, and job deadlines; and ii) a work-conserving task preemption mechanism. We incorporated Natjam in...

A multi-parameter sensitivity analysis of a Bayesian network (BN) used in the digital forensic investigation of the Yahoo! email case has been performed using the principle of ‘steepest gradient’ in the parameter space of the conditional probabilities. This procedure delivers a more reliable result for the dependence of the posterior probability of the BN on the values used to populate the cond...

The objective of this project is to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of information retrieved by three Internet search tools: Yahoo, AltaVista, and Lycos. An 8x2x3 factorial experiment was conducted to compare the precision on relevance for the first ten retrieved links, the sensitivity d' and decision criterion bias beta for finding useful information, and subjective ranking for respon...

Ontologies are commonly used for annotating textual data mainly based on human language technologies [1]. This research focuses on manual extensions of ontologies to support the annotation of business news. Experiments were conducted on a well known Cyc ontology and using Cyc annotator on two business news datasets. We show that the proposed extensions of ontology results in annotation with bet...

Virtual markets are becoming more and more accepted by buyers and sellers. The success of eBay has prompted other companies to offer auction sites to lure buyers and sellers. The new companies usually offer lower rates to attract virtual sellers thereby multiplying the number of options for virtual buyers. This project presents an exploratory study of the final value available to sellers on two...

Yahoo! Research partnered with a nationwide retailer to study the effects of online display advertising on both online and in-store purchases. We use a randomized field experiment on 3 million Yahoo! users who are also past customers of the retailer. We find statistically significant evidence that the retailer ads increase sales 3.6% relative to the control group. We show that control ads boost...

Abstract This paper describes the system submitted to the TREC 2016 LiveQA track. This year, the TREC 2016 LiveQA track consists of implementing a web service to answer user-submitted questions. The newest unanswered question from Yahoo! Answers will be posted to the web service, a question every minute for 24 hours. The implementation described in this paper uses natural language processi...

Community question answering (CQA) has recently become a popular means of satisfying personal information needs, and methods for effectively retrieving information from CQA archives are attracting research interest as the number of reusable questions and answers are rapidly increasing. Rather than having to post a question and wait for an answer, an individual can often obtain an immediate answ...

Purpose – This study investigates the ways in which effectiveness of answers in Yahoo! Answers, one of the largest community question answering sites (CQAs), is related to question types and answerer reputation. Effective answers are defined as those that are detailed, readable, superior in quality, and contributed promptly. Five question types that were studied include factoid, list, definitio...

The finance portion of Yahoo! web portal hosts message boards for many stock ticker symbols. The message traffic on each of the tickers’ message board ranges from less than 10 messages per day to thousands of messages per day. While some discussions on the message boards are relevant to a company and its stock performance, there are many messages on the message boards which are off-topic or con...