In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel dynamic feature function for log-linear model combinations in phrase-based statistical machine translation. The feature function is inspired on the popularly known vector-space model which is typically used in information retrieval and text mining applications, and it aims at improving translation unit selection at decoding time by incorporating context information from the source language. Significant improvements on an English-Spanish experimental corpus are presented and discussed.

One key property of the Semantic Web is its support for interoperability. Recent research in this area focuses on the integration of multiple data sources to facilitate tasks such as ontology learning, user query expansion and context recognition. The growing popularity of such machups and the rising number of Web APIs supporting links between heterogeneous data providers asks for intelligent methods to spare remote resources and minimize delays imposed by queries to external data sources. This paper suggests a cost and utility model for optimizing such queries by leveraging optimal stopping theory from business economics: applications are modeled as decision makers that look for optimal answer sets. Queries to remote resources cause additional cost but retrieve valuable information which improves the estimation of the answer set?s utility. Optimal stopping optimizes the trade-off between query cost and answer utility yielding optimal query strategies for remote resources. These strategies are compared to conventional approaches in an extensive evaluation based on real world response times taken from seven popular Web services.

Outlier detection is a useful technique in such areas as fraud detection, financial analysis and health monitoring. Many recent approaches detect outliers according to reasonable, pre-defined concepts of an outlier (e.g., distance-based, density-based, etc.). However, the definition of an outlier differs between users or even datasets. This paper presents a solution to this problem by including input from the users. Our OBE (Outlier By Example) system is the first that allows users to provide examples of outliers in low-dimensional datasets. By incorporating a small number of such examples, OBE can successfully develop an algorithm by which to identify further outliers based on their outlierness. Several algorithmic challenges and engineering decisions must be addressed in building such a system. We describe the key design decisions and algorithms in this paper. In order to interact with users having different degrees of domain knowledge, we develop two detection schemes: OBE-Fraction and OBE-RF. Our experiments on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that OBE can discover values that a user would consider outliers.

In this paper, we present Esteem (Emergent Semantics and cooperaTion in multi-knowledgE EnvironMents), a community-based P2P platform for supporting semantic collaboration among a set of independent peers, without prior reciprocal knowledge and no predefined relationships. Goal of Esteem is to go beyond the existing state-of-the-art solutions for P2P knowledge sharing and to provide an integrated platform for both data and service discovery. A distinguishing feature of Esteem is the use of semantic communities to explicitly give shape to the collective knowledge and expertise of peer groups with similar interests. Key techniques of Esteem will be presented in the paper and concern: shuffling-based communication, ontology and service matchmaking, context management, and quality-aware data integration. An application example of data and service discovery in the health-care domain will be presented, by also discussing results of system and user evaluation.

Nowadays there is a great number of Web information systems that build a model of the user and adapt their services according to the needs and preferences maintained by the user model (UM). One of the most challenging issues of this scenario is the possibility to enable different systems to cooperate in order to exchange the available information about a user. Our aim is to create rich (and scalable) communication protocols and infrastructures to enable consumers and providers of UM data to interact. Our solution for dealing with such an issue is to exploit Web standards for interoperability (i.e. Semantic Web and Web Services) for implementing simple atomic communication, and a dialogue model for implementing enhanced communication capabilities. In particular, two systems can start a semantics-enhanced Dialogue Game as a form of negotiation to clarify the meaning of the requested concepts when a shared knowledge model does not exist, and to approximate the response when the exact one is not available. We propose a distributed semantic conversation framework based on the Sesame semantic environment for the exchange of user model knowledge on the Web. Systems have to expose their user model data as a Web Service, and to exploit a public dialogue knowledge base to start the dialogue. The main advantage of the approach is to allow systems to deal with difficult situations by starting an appropriate dialogue game instead of stopping the communication as in the traditional ?all-or-nothing? Web Service approach. On the basis of a preliminary evaluation, the approach has shown an improvement of the adaptation results provided by the systems we tested.