Dominik Flejter

Unsupervised Methods of Topical Text Segmentation for Polish

This paper describes a study on performance of existing unsupervised algorithms of text documents topical segmentation when applied to Polish plain text documents. For performance measurement five existing topical segmentation algorithms were selected, three different Polish test collections were created and seven approaches to text pre-processing were implemented. Based on quantitative results (Pk and WindowDiff metrics) use of specific algorithm was recommended and impact of pre-processing strategies was assessed. Thanks to use of standardized metrics and application of previously described methodology for test collection development, comparative results for Polish and English were also obtained.

Bottom-up discovery of clusters of maximal ranges in HTML trees for search engines results extraction

Unsupervised HTML records detection is an important step in many Web content mining applications. In this paper we propose a method of bottom-up discovery of clusters of maximal, non-agglomerative similar HTML ranges in nested set HTML tree representation. Afterward we demonstrate its applicability to records detection in search engines results. For performance measurement several distance assessment strategies were evaluated and two test collections were prepared containing results pages from almost 60 global and country-specific search engines and almost 100 methodically generated complex HTML trees with pre-set properties respectively. Empirical study shows that our method performs well and can detect successfully most of search results ranges clusters.

ADW 2009 Chairs’ Message

We are proud to present for the second time the proceedings of the Advances in Accessing Deep Web workshop. This issue is a collection of the papers presented during the workshop co-located with the Business Information Systems conference, held in Poznan, Poland on 27-29 of April 2009. We established the workshop last year because we identified the need for a publication and discussion forum for young researchers in the Deep Web field. Although mainstream papers in this area are often published on the top Web-related conferences (WWW, WISE, ICWE and others) we thought there is a need to bring together the researchers and stimulate collaboration, especially among young adepts in the field to discuss innovative solutions and ongoing work. A successful second edition of our workshop proves that this need has been fulfilled. The success would not be possible without work of our Program Committee which includes leading researchers in the field coming both from universities and industry. We would like to thank them for encouraging their peers and students to consider our workshop and helping us to organize and rise the scientific level of the workshop with their experience and knowledge. The Program Committee of the Workshop included 16 researchers from eight countries, specializing in different aspects of Deep Web issues. We are happy that we could work together with people that were the first to notice the Deep Web potential and are currently among the leading experts in accessing its resources.

SAW 2009 Workshop Chairs’ Message

In recent years, the Web has moved from a simple one-way communication channel, extending traditional media, to a complex “peer-to-peer” communication space with a blurred author/audience distinction and new ways to create, share, and use knowledge in a social way. This change of paradigm is currently profoundly transforming most areas of our life: our interactions with other people, our relationships, ways of gathering information, ways of developing social norms, opinions, attitudes and even legal aspects, as well as ways of working and doing business. The change also raises a strong need for theoretical, empirical and applied studies related to how people may interact on the Web, how they actually do so, and what new possibilities and challenges are emerging in the social, business and technology dimensions.

MEM&LCW 2008 Workshop PC Chairs' Message

Todays business world relies on a range of sophisticated IT solutions. Due to the sophistication, business and IT have separated in many organizations. That separation has left a gap between the two and has led to frequent IT project failures or escalations. While the gap between business and IT does not pose a difficulty for highly structured business problems and processes that are stable in time, it is a major obstacle for all other problems and processes.