Software Engineering Laboratory

Minetada Osano Professor	Vitaly Klyuev Associate Professor


Information Retrieval Direction

Summarizing methods and text mining are key topics in research conducted by the Software Engineering Lab members. This year, the focus was on techniques to summarize scientific documents retrieved by general purpose search engines. We were interested in the summarization on the fly. Results of our investigations and tests were presented at the IEEE Japan-China on Frontier of Computer Science and Technology Workshop, the IEEE SIBIRCON-2008 Conference, and. The aim of our work in the area of text mining was to improve Web search service. The prototype of the system generating summaries on the fly was created. Our study was supported by a grant from the University of Aizu Competitive Research Funding. Students of our lab were involved in this research. Results of the research were presented at the 2008 Remote Engineering and Virtual Instrumentation International Conference and at The 11th International Conference on Humans and Computers (HC 2008).

Program for Leading Edge IT Specialists

Our lab joined to the Program for Leading Edge IT Specialists organized by our university and offered students a project on Summarizing Tools for General Purpose Search Engines. A team-based way of education and research is a new style of teaching for us. We are working now with the first international group of students consisting of Japanese and Russian students.



Distinguished characteristics of the teaching

• The project combines individual and group work.
  
  
• Each team member is responsible for a dedicated topic.
  
  
• Once a week, each team member reports about his/her individual work and takes part in discussions.
  
  

Rotation of Project Manager Position

• The role of each team member for each month:
  
  
• Two members are software engineers who are responsible for coding and other materials which relates to software development.
  
  
• One team member is a manager who is responsible for the management of the project.
  
  
• Once a month, the functional roles are rotated, so once in three months, everyone is responsible for the management activity.
  
  

Role of the Special Activities

We pioneered in three types of activities.


• Tea seminars: Series of meetings with our consulters and evaluators (Prof. Kendall E. Nygard, USA and Prof. Mark Sifer, Australia) in the relaxing atmosphere.
  
  
• Conference participation: Every member presented a talk at the international conference overseas.
  
  
• Weekly group meetings: Strong internal criticism during discussions.
  
  

International Relations

Exchange of Undergraduate Students

Our undergraduate student Mr. Nobuoka visited Saint Petersburg State University, Russia in April 2007 and presented his paper at the XXXVIII Conference on Control Processes and Stability. Russian undergraduate student Mr. Lipenkov attended the HC 2007 Conference in December 2007. This exchange of students was done in accordance with our agreement with Saint Petersburg State University.



Refereed Journal Papers

[vkluev-01:2008]	D. Vazhenin, S. Satake, S. Ishikawa, and V. Klyuev. A Document Retrieval Framework for Scientific Publications. In Proc. of the IEEE SIBIRCON-2008 Conference, pages pp. 95 – 99, Novosibirsk, Russia, 2008.
	In the academic area, the Internet is used as a scientific resource. However, finding appropriate information on the Web remains difficult. To simplify this process, we designed the document retrieval framework to retrieve scientific publications from the Web. In this paper, we present the architecture of the proposed tool and results of prelimenary test evaluating its quality. This tool can be used by researchers and students when they search for scientific information on the Internet.
[vkluev-02:2008]	S. Satake, S. Ishikawa, D. Vazhenin, and V. Klyuev. A Summarizer for Document Retrieval on the Web. In Proc. of the 2008 Remote Engineering and Virtual Instrumentation International Conference, page CD edition 5 pp. University of Applied Sciences, Dusseldorf, Germany, 2008.
	Searching is the most common task performed on the Web. General purpose search engines are very advanced but finding relevant information is still difficult. Small snippets generated by search engines are evidence of existence of query keywords in the retrieved documents. In many cases, they are not indicative, and users cannot evaluate the relevance of documents. We propose a document retrieval framework to support searching for scientific publications. A prototype, we have designed, works as a front-end part of a general purpose search engine. It creates summaries of retrieved pages on the fly and presents them to the end user. Preliminary tests showed that this approach is promising.
[vkluev-03:2008]	S. Ishikawa, D. Vazhenin, S. Satake, and V. Klyuev. A Web Retrieval and Summarizing Tool. In Proc. of the XXXIX Conference on Control Processes and Stability, pages pp. 395 – 400, St. Petersburg State University, Russia, 2008.
	These days, the Internet is used as a scientific resource. However, finding appropriate information on the Web remains difficult. To simplify this process, we designed the web retrieval and summarizing tool to retrieve scientific publications from the Web. In this paper, we present the system architecture of the proposed tool and results of preliminary experiments evaluating its quality. This tool can be used by researchers and students when they search for scientific information on the Internet.
[vkluev-04:2008]	D. Vazhenin, S. Satake, S.Ishikawa, and V. Klyuev. A Semantic Based Summarizing Tool for a General Purpose Search Engine. In Proc of the 11th International Conference on Humans and Computers, pages pp. 349 – 356, Japan, 2008.
	we designed an intelligent summarizing tool for the scientific publications retrieved from the Web. In this paper, we demonstrate how our framework is convenient to the end user.
[vkluev-05:2008]	V. Klyuev. An Approach to Implementing an Intelligent Web Search. In Proc. Of the IEEE Japan-China on Frontier of Computer Science and Technology, pages pp 125 – 130, Nagasaki,Japan, December 2008.
	The functional approach to present English texts in the memory of computers makes it possible to keep semantic relations between words. These relations can be taken into account when indexing documents and when performing searching. Utilizing this approach, it is possible to use a natural language to express user queries. In many cases, this way is more usual for users to describe their information needs compared to the keyword style. The factoid question answering task is one of the possible its applications. Key components of the prototype of a system utilizing this approach are discussed.

Grants

[vkluev-06:2008]

V. Klyuev. the University of Aizu Competitive Research Funding, 2008.

Academic Activities

[vkluev-07:2008]

V. Klyuev, Apr. 2008. Member, IEEE and ACM

Ph.D, Master and Bachelor Theses

[vkluev-08:2008]	Takaaki Suzuki. Graduation Thesis: A Directory Search Tool with Images and Summaries, University of Aizu, 2009. Thesis Advisor: Klyuev, V.
[vkluev-09:2008]	Yuta Shibasaki. Graduation Thesis: Finding the Right Keywords: A Tool to Support Users, University of Aizu, 2009.
	TThesis Advisor: Klyuev, V.

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