Title
Tobun Dorbin Ng
A Concept Space Approach To Semantic Exchange
Doctor of Philosophy in Management
Management Information Systems
The University of Arizona
April 2000
Abstract
The concept space consultation phase used spreading activation
algorithms - branch-and-bound and Hopfield net algorithms - to explore
knowledge sources in specific domains. This research demonstrated the
comparable effectiveness of exploration of a library database using a
man-made classification scheme and thesaurus as opposed to an
automatically generated concept space. The results showed that the
use of spreading activation algorithms identified more relevant
concepts than the use of the manual browsing method.
The concept space technique automatically identifies and extracts concept
from a library collection while at the same time computing the strength of
associations between concepts. This research demonstrated that the
concept space technique was able to create human-recognizable concepts
and their associations. In addition, the technique could be scaled to
generate very large library-specific concept spaces for a very large
underlying library collection.
Moreover, the interdependent use of both semantic technologies creates a
semantic medium for users and library-specific knowledge sources to
exchange content with context - context in user information need and
that in corporeal knowledge.
Table of Contents
Full Text
Citation
Defense
Lessons Learned
More importantly, it was a journey from a vague beginning
of my career to a clear finishing of this dissertation. I was very
fortunate to have unconditional support from my family and friends
throughout this journey. They have elucidated me
the meaning of life, love, and living.
Acknowledgement & Dedication
Remark on PDF
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This dissertation work investigates the use of information
technologies that clarify semantic meaning to help users elaborate
their information needs by providing library-specific knowledge to the
information seeking process. The research involved two interdependent
semantic technologies: concept space consultation and
library-specific, domain-specific, automatically generated concept
spaces.
Chapter 1 Introduction
14
Chapter 2 Literature Review
17
Chapter 3 Research Questions and Methodologies
56
Chapter 4 Concept Space Consultation
69
Chapter 5 Large-scale Concept Space Generation
122
Chapter 6 Conclusions
162
Appendix A. Benchmark Testing
173
Appendix B. Sample Sessions
177
Appendix C. Cancer Space: A Web-based Information Retrieval System
182
Appendix D. Funding and Acknowledgements
189
References
191
Ng, Tobun Dorbin.
A Concept Space Approach To Semantic Exchange.
Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Arizona.
April, 2000.
Presentation slides used in my dissertation defense is available
in PowerPoint format.
This dissertation has cumulated some research work
performed over last decade (of the twentieth century) in the AI Lab.
The research value and lessons learned were documented
in various journal articles in addition to this dissertation.
We are loved beyond our capacity to comprehend.
Both of the
Acknowledgement
and
Dedication
sections of my dissertation are extracted
to separate web pages.
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