Guanpi Lai

US domestic extremist groups on the Web: link and content analysis

Although US domestic extremist and hate groups might not be as well-known as some international groups, they nevertheless pose a significant threat to homeland security. Increasingly, these groups are using the Internet as a tool for facilitating recruitment, linking with other extremist groups, reaching global audiences, and spreading hate materials that encourage violence and terrorism. A study of semiautomated methodologies to capture and organize domestic extremist Web site data revealed interorganizational structures and cluster affinities that coincided with both domain expert knowledge and earlier manual research.

Exploring the dark side of the web: collection and analysis of u.s. extremist online forums

Contents in extremist online forums are invaluable data sources for extremism reseach. In this study, we propose a systematic Web mining approach to collecting and monitoring extremist forums. Our proposed approach identifies extremist forums from various resources, addresses practical issues faced by researchers and experts in the extremist forum collection process. Such collection provides a foundation for quantitative forum analysis. Using the proposed approach, we created a collection of 110 U.S. domestic extremist forums containing more than 640,000 documents. The collection building results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of our approach. Furthermore, the extremist forum collection we created could serve as an invaluable data source to enable a better understanding of the extremism movements.

Organizing domain-specific information on the Web: An experiment on the Spanish business Web directory

Web directories organize voluminous information into hierarchical structures, helping users to quickly locate relevant information and to support decision-making. The development of existing ontologies and Web directories either relies on expert participation that may not be available or uses automatic approaches that lack precision. As more users access the Web in their native languages, better approaches to organizing and developing non-English Web directories are needed. In this paper, we have proposed a semi-automatic framework, which consists of anchor directory boosting, meta-searching, and heuristic filtering, to construct domain-specific Web directories. Using the framework, we have built a Web directory in the Spanish business (SBiz) domain. Experimental results show that the SBiz Web directory achieved significantly better recall, F-value, efficiency, and satisfaction rating than the benchmark directory. Subjects provided favorable comments on the SBiz Web directory. This research thus contributes to developing a useful framework for organizing domain-specific information on the Web and to providing empirical findings and useful insights for end-users, system developers, and researchers of Web information seeking and knowledge management.

Toward an ITS specific knowledge engine

New technologies and researches are being developed every day for Intelligent Transportation Systems. How to recognize and maximize the potentials of ITS technologies becomes a big challenge for ITS researchers. Usually people would rely on general search engines like Yahoo!, Google to retrieve related information. The direct problem of these search engines is information overload [1]. Another issue with the search engines is that its difficult to keep the web pages up-to-date.

Supporting Information Seeking in Multinational Organizations: A Knowledge Portal Approach

As multinational organizations increasingly use the Web to seek information, there is a need for better support of searching the Web across different regions. However, support for Internet searching in non-English speaking regions is much weaker than that in English-speaking regions. To alleviate the problems, we propose a knowledge portal approach to supporting cross-regional searching of multinational organizations. The approach was used to build two Web portals in the Spanish business and Arabic medical domains. Experimental results show that our portals achieved significantly better performance (in terms of search accuracy and user satisfaction) than existing search engines in the corresponding domains. The encouraging findings point to a promising future of the approach to facilitating cross-regional searching in multinational organizations.