Software Engineering Laboratory

Minetada Osano Professor	Vitaly Klyuev Associate Professor

Information Retrieval Direction

Query expansion techniques for query-oriented document summarization are key topics in research conducted by the Software Engineering Lab members. This year, our focus was on techniques to expand the user queries. The goal was to improve the accuracy of retrieval and the quality of the summaries of scientific documents created on the fly. Results of our investigations and tests were presented at the IEEE 2009 Joint Conferences on Pervasive Computing, the 2009 IEEE 5th International Workshop on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications, . 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 designed last year was significantly improved. 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 Second International Conference on Advances in Human-Oriented and Personalized Mechanisms, Technologies, and Services and at The 12th International Conference on Humans and Computers.

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. The first international group of students consisting of Japanese and Russian students successfully completed the program of the study in the autumn of 2009.



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.
  
  

Lessons Learned

The problems which should be taken into account our successors:


• Background of each member
  
  
• Development of the students as independent researchers
  
  
• Assessment
  
  
• Self-organizing team
  
  
• Job hunting
  
  

International Relations

In June 2009, the agreement between our university and Saint Petersburg Polytechnical State University (http://www.spbstu-eng.ru/) on scientific and educational cooperation was signed in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. The Software Engineering Lab plays a key pole in the collaboration activities. Evgeny Pyshkin, Associate Prof. of our partner university was invited in November 2009 to introduce the intensive course on Object-Oriented Software Engineering for our graduate students.
Prof. Klyuev was granted a Fellowship under the Joint program between the Research Council of Norway (RCN) and the Japan Science and Technology Society, place to work: University of Agder, Grimstad, Norway, project Fast Search Algorithms, period: August - September, 2009. The results of the joined project were accepted for the presentation at The 2010 InternationalWorkshop on Future Engineering, Applications and Services of the 5th International Conference on Future Information Technology sponsored by IEEE, Korea, May 2010.



Exchange of Undergraduate Students

Our undergraduate student Ms. Ai Yokoyama visited Saint Petersburg State University, Russia in April 2009 and presented her paper at the XL Conference on Control Processes and Stability.
Russian undergraduate student Mr. Arkady Zgonnikov attended the HC 2009 Conference in December 2009. The report on the results of this trip was published on the Web site of Saint Petersburg State University
(http://www.apmath.spbu.ru/ru/structure/international/finishedprojects.html#human). This exchange of students was done in accordance with our agreement with Saint Petersburg State University.



Refereed Journal Papers

[vkluev-01:2009]	V. Klyuev. An Approach to Implementing an Intelligent Web Search. Journal of Communication and Computer, 6(7 (Serial No 56),):52–57, 2009.
	In this paper, we discuss the fetures of the functional approach to present English texts in the memory of computers. It makes it possible to keep semantic relations between words. These relations can be taken into account when indexing documents and when performing searching. The factoid question answering task is one of the possible applications of this approach.

Refereed Proceeding Papers

Unrefereed Papers

[vkluev-03:2009]	S. Ebisu and V. Klyuev. An Algorithm to Generate Indicative Summaries for Japanese Documents. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Humans and Computers, pages 191–194. University of Aizu, December 2009.
	In this paper, we propose an algorithm that chooses the most important sentences semantically relevant to the user query and derives the paragraphs including them. This algorithm is applicable to the Japanese language.
[vkluev-04:2009]	V. Oleshchuk and V. Klyuev. Context-Aware Summary Generation for Web Pages. In Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE 5th International Workshop on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications (IDAACS), Rende, Italy, 2009, pages 561–564. IEEE, IEEE, September 2009.
	General purpose search engines provide users with lists of retrieved documents in response to their queries. The common structure of list elements includes the title of a document, its URL, and small snippet from the text. Snippets are evidence of occurrences of query ’s keywords in the document. The length of each snippet is just a couple of lines. They cannot play a role of summaries of retrieved documents: In many cases, they are not indicative and users cannot judge on the relevancy of documents. In our approach we use ontology as context description and that ontology will be used to describe user ’s main interest with respect to wanted summary and help to select weighting of key words and other semantically related words. Using such semantically related words would make it possible to generate summaries that are more semantically focused with respect to user ’s interests/queries.
[vkluev-05:2009]	A. Yokoyama and V. Klyuev. Query expansion using WordNet for the Japanese information retrieval task. In Proc. of the XL Conference on Control Processes and Stability, 2009,, pages 385–389. Saint Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg State University Publishing Press, April 2009.
	Nowadays, Internet users are familiar with the Web searching process; and the searching is the most common tasks performed on the Web. On the other hand, users receive non relevant information in response to queries. The web search is especially difficult for beginners when they utilize a keyword query language. Usually beginner users apply ambiguous queries. Our goal is to make the search process more convenient for them. We assume the first page returned by a search engine is the most important one for the user. We find the most important terms on the page, assuming they are related to the user query words. In addition to that, we get synonyms and hyponyms for the words in the user query utilizing WordNet. We combine aforementioned words together. This expanded query is then submitted to the search engine. These functions are done automatically, so the web searching process is becoming easier for beginners.
[vkluev-06:2009]	D. Vazhenin, S. Ishikawa, and V. Klyuev. A User-Oriented Web Retrieval Summarization Tool. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Advances in Human-Oriented and Personalized Mechanisms, Technologies, and Services, Porto, Portugal, 2009, pages 73–78. IEEE Computer Society, September 2009.
	The information resources on the web become increasingly global in nature. Their amount is continuingly growing. A solution to summarize the retrieved pages on the fly and to design the simplest user interface is possible approach to improve and speed up the retrieval of the information from the web. This paper discusses the algorithms to implement the aforementioned approach and results of preliminary experiments.
[vkluev-07:2009]	S. Satake, S. Ishikawa, D. Vazhenin, and V. Klyuev. A Semantic-Based Summarizing Tool for Improving the Usability of General Purpose Search Engines. In Proceedings of The 2009 Joint Conferences on Pervasive Computing, pages 5 p, CD edition. IEEE, IEEE, December 2009.
	Nowadays, the Internet is an important source of scientific information. However, retrieval of relevant information on the Web still remains difficult. To simplify this process, we designed a semantic summarizing tool for scientific publications retrieved from the Web. In this paper, we presented the architecture of our approach and demonstrated how our solution works.

[vkluev-02:2009]	V. Klyuev. How to Make a Web Search more Intelligent (In Japanese). Fukushima Review, ISSN 0288-0954, (7):40–44, 2009.
	This paper analyzes the intelligent approaches to create a next generation of search engines. Illustrative examples are provided.

Chapters in Book

[vkluev-08:2009]

G. Nikishkov V. Klyuev. ICTs for Modern Educational and Instructional Advancement: New Approaches to Teaching, Chapter 13: Using a Web- Based System to support Teaching Processes., pages 151–166. IGI Global, 2010.

Grants

[vkluev-09:2009]

V. Klyuev. Fellowship under the Joint programme between the Research Council of Norway (RCN) and the Japan Society, 2009.

Academic Activities

[vkluev-10:2009]

V Klyuev, Apr. 2009. Member: IEEE, IEIC

Ph.D, Master and Graduation Theses

[vkluev-11:2009]	Denis Vazhenin. Master Thesis: Architecture of a Summarizing Tool for General Purpose Search Engines, University of Aizu, 2009. Thesis Advisor: V. Klyuev
[vkluev-12:2009]	Satoru Satake. Master Thesis: Applied Methods for a Semanticallybased Summarizing Tool, University of Aizu, 2009. Thesis Advisor: V. Klyuev
[vkluev-13:2009]	Satoru Ishikawa. Master Thesis: Summarizing Tool for General Purpose Search Engines: Tests and Evaluation, University of Aizu, 2009. Thesis Advisor: V. Klyuev
[vkluev-14:2009]	Ai Yokoyama. Graduation Thesis: Search Engine Query Expansion using Japanese WordNet, University of Aizu, 2010. Thesis Advisor: V. Klyuev
[vkluev-15:2009]	Sayuri Ebisu. Graduation Thesis: An Approach to Generate Indicative Summaries for Japanese Documents, University of Aizu, 2010. Thesis Advisor: V. Klyuev
[vkluev-16:2009]	Yuta Hiraki. Graduation Thesis: Comparison of Summarization Methods, University of Aizu, 2010. Thesis Advisor: V. Klyuev

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