Philippe Beaune

A Negotiation Support System based on a Multi-agent System: specificity and preference relations on arguments

In this paper, we propose a Negotiation Support System based on a Multi-agent System. Each agent assists a user in multi-criteria decision making and negotiates according to this decision-modelling with other agents, each of them representing a user. Moreover agents assist users in the debate to negotiate a joint representation of the problem and automatically justify proposals with this joint representation.

Recall-Oriented Evaluation for Information Retrieval Systems

In a recall context, the user is interested in retrieving all relevant documents rather than retrieving a few that are at the top of the results list. In this article we propose ROM Recall Oriented Measure which takes into account the main elements that should be considered in evaluating information retrieval systems while ordering them in a way explicitly adapted to a recall context.

Engineering a protocol server using strategy-agents

This paper addresses the idea of using a server of negotiation protocols to facilitate negotiations in an open multi-agent system. The agents that do not know the negotiation protocols of the system can query the server for a description of the protocol and use it in negotiations. After pointing out some of the major problems encountered by the existing approaches, we propose a special type of agent (called strategy-agent) that knows how to negotiate using a fixed protocol and negotiation strategy. Such an agent will then negotiate for the benefit of other agents that do not know the required protocol.

Exploring query reformulation for named entity expansion in information retrieval

Named Entities are valuable information containers. Expanding these elements is an ongoing research area in information retrieval. In this paper, we focus on the way in which named entity expansions are added to the query. Three approaches are explored: Bag Of Words, Sequential Dependence and Key Concept. Evaluating these three approaches for named entity expansion reveals interesting improvements in precision and recall.

Simulation of Distributed Industrial Systems

We are located in the context of the industrial system simulation, which are complex and distributed in operational, informational and decisional terms. In this chapter, we present the problems and a methodological solution. This methodology is based on the systemic approach and on multi-agent systems. It allows the modelling of distributed industrial systems such as enterprise consortiums. Moreover, it proposes a software platform architecture whish is currently instanced with Arena and dedicated agents.

The role of ontologies in a multi-agent based data integration system

In this paper, we present a flexible architecture allowing applications to access heterogeneous distributed manufacturing data. The objective is to eliminate data duplication and therefore the need for their synchronization and complex update. We propose a multiagent architecture based on ontologies for integrating the different data sources and for retrieving desired data. Web services are also used for agent-application communication. This is still an on-going work.

Conceptual design and implementation of spatial data warehouses integrating regular grids of points

ABSTRACT Spatial online analytical processing (OLAP) and spatial data warehouse (SDW) systems are geo-business intelligence technologies that enable the analysis of huge volumes of geographic data. In the last decade, the conceptual design and implementation of SDWs that integrate spatial data, which are represented using the vector model, have been extensively investigated. However, the integration of field data (a continuous representation of spatial data) in SDWs is a recent unresolved research issue. Enhancing SDWs with field data improves the spatio-multidimensional analysis capabilities with continuity and multiresolutions. Motivated by the need for a conceptual design tool and relational online analytical processing (ROLAP) implementation, we propose a UML profile for SDWs that integrates a regular grid of points and supports continuity and multiresolutions. We also propose an efficient implementation of a ROLAP architecture.

SMERA: Semantic Mixed Approach for Web Query Expansion and Reformulation

Matching users’ information needs and relevant documents is the basic goal of information retrieval systems. However, relevant documents do not necessarily contain the same terms as the ones in users’ queries. In this paper, we use semantics to better express users’ queries. Furthermore, we distinguish between two types of concepts: those extracted from a set of pseudo relevance documents, and those extracted from a semantic resource such as an ontology. With this distinction in mind we propose a Semantic Mixed query Expansion and Reformulation Approach (SMERA) that uses these two types of concepts to improve web queries. This approach considers several challenges such as the selective choice of expansion terms, the treatment of named entities, and the reformulation of the query in a user-friendly way. We evaluate SMERA on four standard web collections from INEX and TREC evaluation campaigns. Our experiments show that SMERA improves the performance of an information retrieval system compared to non-modified original queries. In addition, our approach provides a statistically significant improvement in precision over a competitive query expansion method while generating concept-based queries that are more comprehensive and easy to interpret.

From Design to Visualization of Spatial OLAP Applications: A First Prototyping Methodology

The design of Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) applications consists of (i) Spatial Data Warehouse (SDW) model design and (ii) SOLAP visualization definition because a specific set of understandable and readable cartographic visualizations corresponds to a particular type of SOLAP query. Unfortunately few works investigate geovisualization issues in SOLAP systems and propose new methodologies to visualize spatio-temporal data, and no works investigate tools for readable SOLAP cartographic displays. Moreover, some works propose ad-hoc methodologies for DWs and SDWs exclusively based on data and user analysis requirements. Therefore, we present in this paper (i) a new geovisualization methodology for SOLAP queries that yields readable maps and (ii) a new prototyping design methodology for SOLAP applications that accounts for geovisualization requirements.

MOR : Mesure orientée rappel pour les systèmes de recherche d’information

La majorite des metriques d’evaluation en recherche d’information donnent plus d’importance a la precision qu’au rappel, ce qui est coherent avec certains contextes, comme la recherche sur internet, ou les utilisateurs regardent uniquement les premiers documents apparaissant en debut de la liste de resultats. Ces metriques d’evaluation ne sont pas capables de predire a quel point l’utilisateur sera satisfait du systeme s’il cherche a trouver le maximum de documents pertinents, comme dans le cas de la recherche de brevets ou de la recherche dans un contexte medical. Dans cet article, nous definissons les besoins principaux pour evaluer et comparer des systemes de recherche d’information dans un contexte oriente rappel. Nous montrons que les mesures precedemment proposees dans la litterature ne repondent pas a ces besoins, ce qui nous amene a proposer la mesure MOR qui permet de comparer correctement le rappel des systemes de recherche d’information.