Introduction to Soft Computing for Information Access on the Web Minitrack

Gabriella Pasi
2013 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences  
The huge growth of the World Wide Web poses a big challenge in the problem of automatically accessing the information/data/services relevant to specific user's needs. The Web is nowadays a continuously evolving information repository that can be accessed by some automatic systems for locating, accessing, and retrieving information. These systems include Search Engines and Information Filtering systems. The task of providing a fast and effective localisation of the information relevant to
more » ... c users' needs is very hard and complex, since it is pervaded with subjectivity, vagueness, and uncertainty, and it also requires context adaptation. The huge amount of research in this scientific domain witnesses that we still need satisfactory systems to accomplish the task of effectively accessing the various kind of information on the Web that can be relevant to specific needs and tasks. In this context soft computing techniques and methodologies can be synergistically applied to the aim of providing flexible information processing approaches tolerant to imprecision, vagueness, uncertainty, and approximation. So, soft computing represents a good candidate to design effective systems for information access and retrieval on the Web, as also witnessed by the considerable number of contributions that have appeared in the literature in this context. The mini-track is focused on soft computing in information access on the Web, and it collects three contributions. The first contribution, by Ronald R Yager and Rachel L Yager is titled Social Networks: Querying and Sharing Mined Information. The authors first discuss how to enrich social network modeling by introducing ideas from fuzzy sets and related soft computing technologies. Then they propose to use the fuzzy set based paradigm of computing with words to provide a bridge between a human network analyst's linguistic description of social network concepts and the formal model of the network. The second contribution by Giovanna Castellano, Anna Maria Fanelli, Francesco Paparella, and Maria Alessandra Torsello is titled Fuzzy Shape Clustering for Image Retrieval. The paper proposes an approach to shape-based image retrieval, where as a first step the shapes of objects in images are represented by Fourier descriptors, and then, as a second step a fuzzy clustering process discovers a set of shape prototypes representative of a number of semantic categories that are matched against users queries. The third contribution is titled Search and Graphical Visualization of Concepts in Document Sets Using Taxonomies, by Andreas Schmidt, Markus Dickerhof, and Daniel Kimmig. The paper proposes an approach to search semantic concepts in documents based on the use of conceptual taxonomies. The proposed algorithm processes a query by ranking documents according to conceptual relevance, and it offers a graphical representation of the detected concepts inside a document.
doi:10.1109/hicss.2013.358 dblp:conf/hicss/Pasi13 fatcat:dz4f2ctkfzfcxgm327xx5rbyvm